Coronavirus will likely be sticking around seasonally — like the common flu largely because of asymptomatic carriers who can unwittingly spread the virus, according to a report.
“This is very likely to be an epidemic that co-exists with humans for a long time, becomes seasonal and is sustained within human bodies,” the director of the Institute of Pathogen Biology Jin Qi said, according to a Bloomberg report.
COVID-19 probably won’t be eradicated like it’s cousin SARS was nearly two decades ago, because some people who have the virus don’t show signs, meaning it can spread silently.
This makes it hard to contain unlike SARS which was successfully eradicated through quarantine, a group of Chinese scientists said Monday.
Meanwhile, dozens of asymptomatic cases keep popping up in China, in China despite the fact that they claim to have gotten the disease under control, the outlet reported.
Governments and researchers are beginning to agree that the virus won’t disappear, regardless of drastic measures many countries have taken, including stay-at-home orders that are playing havoc on the world’s economy, the report said.
And Chinese scientists say they haven’t found evidence that the warmer months of summer would help slow the spread of the virus — something the Trump administration has previously expressed hopes about, the news outlet said.
“The virus is heat sensitive, but that’s when it’s exposed to 56 degrees Celsius [or 132 degrees Fahrenheit] for 30 minutes and the weather is never going to get that hot,” said Wang Guiqiang, the Director of the Infectious Disease Department at Peking University First Hospital.
“So globally, even during the summer, the chance of cases going down significantly is small.”
Monday, the amount of cases globally surpassed 3 million while over 200,000 people have died from coronavirus.
