A map showing just how the coronavirus could have been spread from the epicentre Wuhan has been compiled by researchers as the outbreak is revealed to have killed more 1,000 people the world over, according to data form the Chinese government released Monday evening.
A total of 103 people died in a single day in China’s Hubei province on Monday – the highest toll recorded in any one 24-hour period since the outbreak began in December.
It comes the same day as the World Health Organization (WHO) experts and scientists have finally arrived in China to help officials there contain and study the outbreak which has now struck at least 42,729 people worldwide.
A map created by Southampton University researchers shows how 60,000 out of a total of five million people who have travelled out of Wuhan since the beginning of the outbreak and before the city was fully locked down have crisscrossed the globe.
Researchers used a combination cell phone tracking data and flight trackers to trace travellers paths.
The result is a red scribble of trajectories to 382 cities elsewhere in China and in countries the world over.
Over the weekend, the first death of an American from coronavirus was also reported in Wuhan, the Hubei city where the virus is believed to have first made the jump from a game sold at an open-air market to humans.
Now, cases have been confirmed in at least 24 other countries, although only two of the confirmed deaths occurred outside China.
On a single cruise ship docked and quarantined in Japan, at least 136 people have contracted coronavirus – including 23 Americans – with the number of passengers or crew onboard testing positive for the virus doubling over Sunday night.
The number of new cases reported each day in China does seem to be slowing, and travel restrictions appear to be keeping many countries case counts fairly stable, but global health experts warn the outbreak is far from over.
In fact, earlier on Monday, the WHO warned that the more than 40,000 cases already reported by then were likely just ‘the tip of the iceberg,’ as they expect that people with mild or no symptoms have not been diagnosed – yet – leading to an underestimate of total illnesses worldwide.
As of the latest figures, China still has the vast majority of coronavirus cases, with 42,268 and 1,011 deaths.
Of those patients, more than 7,300 are in ‘serious/critical’ condition.
There are now 391 cases outside China with cases of coronavirus, but only one death has been confirmed in the Philippines, and one in Hong Kong.
Coronaviruses are a common cause of respiratory illness and, even for severe ones like the 2003 SARS virus and the current outbreak – temporarily dubbed 2019-nCoV – they are not particularly dangerous to most healthy people.
But SARS infections had a relatively high death rate, killing nearly 10 per cent of those it infected. The current coronavirus has a death rate below 2 per cent.
