Georgian Citizens Evacuated as China Death Toll Exceeds 360

The outbreak of the flu-like coronavirus has prompted various countries to impose travel restrictions, suspending all flights to/from mainland China, increasingly isolating the country of more than 1.3 billion people.

The WHO recommends introducing screening at border crossings, warning that travel bans are not as effective as they seem at hindering the spread of a virus and can make responding to an outbreak more challenging.

"Travel restrictions can cause more harm than good by hindering info-sharing, medical supply chains, and harming economies," the head of the WHO, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said on Friday.

Georgia has likewise suspended direct flights with China to prevent the spread of the virus. Turkey evacuated three Georgian citizens from the epicenter of the outbreak; France evacuated two. Those Georgian citizens will undergo a two-week quarantine before arriving in Georgia.

Many of the world’s leading infectious disease experts fear the coronavirus may make its way across the globe and become a pandemic, defined as an ongoing epidemic on several continents. Unlike its slow-moving cousin SARS, for instance, the Wuhan virus spreads rapidly and is highly transmissible. 

Rapidly rising caseloads alarm researchers, with the overall death toll rising to at least 360 in China, and more that 2,000 new cases reported in the past 24 hours. During the SARS outbreak, 349 people died in mainland China.

Yet health experts say they are encouraged by the steady rise in the number of recoveries and effective treatments that show that the new virus does not appear to be as deadly as SARS. SARS had a mortality rate of 9.6 %, while only about 2% of those infected with the coronavirus have died.

The vast majority of the cases are inside China. Other countries that have confirmed cases are: Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Japan, Macau, Russia, France, the United States, Taiwan, Australia, Malaysia, South Korea, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, Italy, India, the Philippines, Nepal, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Finland, Sweden, Spain, Canada and Britain.

Cases reported in Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam, Germany, France, Japan and the United States involve patients who had not visited China.

The Georgian National Disease Control Center announced yesterday that no cases of coronavirus have been detected in Georgia so far. 

“Georgia spares no efforts to prevent coronavirus. The health system of the country is in full readiness and is ready to provide the necessary treatment in compliance with modern standards even if the virus will spread”, the Center stated.