Geneva: The novel coronavirus is 10 times more deadly than swine flu, also called H1N1, which caused a global pandemic in 2009, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said Monday. It called for the control measures to be lifted ‘slowly’.
“We know that COVID-19 spreads fast, and we know that it is deadly, 10 times more deadly than the 2009 flu pandemic,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual briefing from here. “As of now the only control measures for restricting the spread of the virus is through social distancing as no vaccine has so far been found to fight against it,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus added.
The pandemic coronavirus has now spread to more than 190 countries and the death toll due the disease has reached more than 1,14,000. The United States, Italy and Spain are the worst affected since the coronavirus emerged in China last year.