A person wears a masks in Chinatown following the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, in Chicago, Illinois January 30, 2020.
Kamil Krzaczynski | Reuters
The brand new pressure of coronavirus that has created a lethal epidemic in China is “much more contagious” than the flu, a high pharma CEO informed CNBC.
Talking to CNBC’s Julianna Tatelbaum Friday, AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot mentioned the virus, formally named COVID-19, was a extremely contagious an infection.
“What we’ve all realized is that the virus results in a decrease mortality than the flu virus, nevertheless it’s much more contagious, the virus may be very contagious,” he mentioned. “I cannot say it’s very managed but, however I am hoping that over the subsequent few months that we are going to see it get beneath management.”
Not less than 19 million people across the U.S. have been contaminated this flu season, in line with information from the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention, which has resulted in 10,000 deaths and 180,000 hospitalizations.
Regardless of the excessive contagion price of COVID-19, Soriot informed CNBC he was optimistic that Chinese language authorities would have the ability to include the virus, noting that “we acquired previous” the outbreak of H1N1 — often known as swine flu — round a decade in the past.
“The Chinese language authorities has actually swung a variety of assets, a variety of effort at controlling the illness as a lot as they’ll within the nation, there’s been a variety of work…