Daniel Falush, Professor at the Institute Pasteur in Shanghai who is currently working on Coronavirus Outreach gave his views on whether the British Government should step up its clampdown on the Coronavirus.
Daniel Falush: I think they have now admitted that that’s the case, that there is no real other option but to contain, or to suppress the virus.
Imperial just published a report which was kind of astonishing, where they basically accepted that that was the only feasible course of action, so that’s very good news and I’m extremely glad that they’ve come round to that opinion.
Sputnik: How damaging could the Coronavirus be to the global economy?
Daniel Falush: China kind of shut down for about a month or six weeks, and there is still plenty of stuff in the shops, most people still have their jobs, the economy is getting started again, a lot of people are having a hard time, but I think that the loss to the economy is large.
Unfortunately; I very much fear that the cost to the economy in Britain and in Europe will be substantially larger because in China the real problem was localised to one place, and everywhere else it was really cut off before it got going.
The longer you wait to really clamp down on it, the longer it’s going to take to cut down, and the more damage it will do, so I kind of think that Europe is going to lose three months of productivity due to this, there is nothing better than that possible now.
Sputnik: Is the Coronavirus more deadly than the flu?
Daniel Falush: It’s kind of the mistake that I think that the Imperial scientists make, is that they try and put the Coronavirus in the same box as flu, because it’s a respiratory disease, but its mortality is so much higher, that it’s really a lot worse.
It’s kind of halfway between flu and Ebola on a logarithmic scale, that’s how I think about it, and what that means; is that the amount of death and disruption to the health system is so large, that it’s just not like flu at all.
