WHO warns coronavirus may be 'around for months'

The World Health Organization warned Monday that the new coronavirus might be around for months but said the measures China implemented have prevented the infections of hundreds of thousands of people.

Bruce Aylward, leader of a joint WHO-China mission of experts, said the world can learn from the nation's approach to restraining the virus.

"The single biggest lesson is speed. Speed is everything and what worries me most is, has the rest of the world learned the lesson of speed?" Aylward said at a press conference presenting the mission's findings.

"We have outbreaks in multiple countries right now, increasing at exponential growth rates," he said.

China has quarantined the central city of Wuhan and other cities in Hubei province for a month while also imposing drastic restrictions on movement in other parts of the country.

The epidemic has killed nearly 2,600 people and infected some 77,000 people in China, with new cases and fatalities emerging in Europe, the Middle East and Asia in recent days.

Aylward said Beijing's "bold approach" had "changed the course" of the epidemic, adding that the measures have "probably prevented... hundreds of thousands of cases of COVID-19 here in China."

The number of cases of infection in the country have been generally declining over recent weeks -- although questions have been raised about the credibility of official data as the local authorities have changed their reporting method and revised figures several times.

Aylward said that although there have been "challenges with the statistics that have come out of China sometimes", he believed the "trends have been incredibly clear".

He called on China to start lifting some of the restrictions, including travel curbs and tourism shutdowns.

"Obviously they want to get society back to a more normal semblance of what probably is the new normal, because this virus may be around... for months," he said.

However, National Health Commission official Liang Wannian warned that the situation in Wuhan was still "grim".

Aylward praised China's success so far in containing the virus but maintained that the main risk for any government was being too complacent.

"Thinking you've beaten this virus is the single biggest risk," he said.

"As we dug into and came to understand the knowledge, the tools, the capacities they had built in China, it's again our conclusion that this was the right thing to be doing," he said.

The spread of COVID-19 in other parts of the world has accelerated over the past week, with Iran, South Korea and Italy emerging as the worst new hotspots.

Deaths were reported in each of those countries on Monday, while Afghanistan, Bahrain and Kuwait also announced their first cases of the virus.

'Steep decline in Coronavirus cases in China'

Canadian epidemiologist Bruce Aylward, who heads the WHO mission team to China, said that he has seen a steep decline in newly-reported cases compared to the number when he first arrived in China two weeks ago.

On Monday, the Chinese officials said the death toll has climbed to 2,592 with 150 new fatalities while the total number of confirmed cases increased to over 77,000.

"I know the challenges with the statistics that come out of China sometimes with changing numbers and what we had to do is look very carefully different sources of information to say confidently this is actually declining," Aylward told reporters here.

"A lot of compelling data and observations on the ground to support this decline," he added.

Aylward headed the first WHO technical team on February 10 and later paved the way for a 12-member expert team which arrived in Beijing last Monday.

The team along with Chinese experts visited worst-hit Hubei province over the weekend to conduct field investigations on the virus outbreak.

The experts visited Tongji Hospital, the Wuhan Sports Centre that was converted into a temporary hospital, and the provincial centre for disease control and prevention to learn about the epidemic prevention and control as well as medical treatment, China's National Health Commission (NHC) said.

They also talked to the officials and experts in the province and briefed NHC director Ma Xiaowei on their findings and suggestions.

Aylward said when he arrived in Beijing on February 10 China was reporting about 2,500 cases a day which now has declined to over 400 which is 80 per cent.

The observation of the WHO team was made from the data collected from fever clinics and the availability of the hospital beds, he said.

Data from the fever clinics show the cases declined from 46,000 at one point to about 13,000. The cases dropped amid heightened awareness and push to get them tested, he said.

Secondly, doctors in Wuhan were reporting for the first time vacant beds in hospitals to accommodate new patients, he said.

At one time the rapid increase of cases was such that China had to build two makeshift hospitals with a capacity of 2,300 beds and later officials converted stadiums and dormitories into hospitals to accommodate more patients.

"The (WHO) team wanted to be convinced. Very rapidly multiple sources of data point to the same thing" that is the cases are falling and they are falling because of actions that are being taken, he said.

"The world needs the experiences and expertise of China, as the country is the most experienced in the world, which has turned around a serious outbreak," he said.

The only success the world had in tackling with COVID-19 is in China, where old approaches like suspension of travel and quarantine was used, he said.

"There's no question that China's bold approach has changed the course of rapidly escalation of this epidemic. These significant measures could only be adopted with tremendous collective will, not only in community but also top officials, which is also rare to see," Aylward said.

Liang Wannian, who headed the Chinese experts team, said the deadly coronavirus has not significantly mutated.

"The animal host has not been confirmed - a bat could be the host, but also a pangolin," Liang Wannian said.

"The transmission route is respiratory droplets. The fecal-oral route needs to be further studied," Liang said in the joint press conference with Aylward.

Liang said that 3,000 medical staff, mostly in the worst-hit Wuhan, are estimated to have been infected by the virus. Ten medical staff have died.

Aylward said China has rolled out "the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment efforts in history" and the nation has kept refining the strategies, from handwashing, mask-wearing and social distancing to more science and research based approach.

He said these efforts have been possible only because of a "tremendous collective commitment and will" of the Chinese people at all levels.

He said China's use of an "all-of-government" and "all-of-society" approach has definitely averted and prevented hundreds of thousands of cases of COVID-19.