'Isolating cases and quarantining contacts is not going to stop this virus,' says Ira Longini, a WHO adviser.
If the virus spreads to anywhere near that extent, it will show the limitations of China's strict containment measures, including quarantining areas inhabited by tens of millions of people. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has credited those steps with giving the rest of China and the world a "window" in which to prepare.
"Unless the transmissibility changes, surveillance and containment can only work so well," Longini, co-director of the Centre for Statistics and Quantitative Infectious Diseases at the University of Florida, said in an interview at WHO headquarters in Geneva.He's not alone in warning of the possibility of a far greater spread.
"People change behaviours" in response to disease, he said. "This is kind of a worst-case scenario. It's one of the possibilities."
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