Mortality rate of COVID19 below SARS: Dr Anil Jasinghe

The mortality rate of China’s COVID19 epidemic is of or below 2 per cent from those who contracted the virus, which is low compared to the SARS epidemic which had a reported mortality rate of 10 per cent, Director General of Health Dr Anil Jasinghe said.

He said the cases were reported from 25 countries were patients who left the Wuhan Province before it was locked down.
“We started taking measures pretty early. However, we must give credit to China that they contained the virus within China as much as possible which paved the way for this disease to not spread all over the world.

“As I witnessed it, in his presentation the Director-General of the WHO pointed out that the spread of this virus out of China is not so significant. They were full of praise for the People’s Republic of China for their actions, their transparency and their technological brilliance in curbing this disease,” Dr Jasinghe said.
 
Commenting on how will the pneumonia epidemic affect Sino-Sri Lankan culture, economy, trade, project meetings and personnel in Sri Lanka, he said “ at the very outset of the outbreak, there were certain stigmas attached to it and Sri Lankans reacted as anyone else would normally do without knowing what exactly the case was. But we took stern measures with regard to diffusing the myths and stigma on this disease. To be safe, you’ve to take certain measures, but you shouldn’t take myths or other unfound measures into consideration. We didn’t restrict the Chinese or anyone else for that matter, from visiting our country, but the Chinese government and maybe the others concerned imposed such warnings or restrictions. While monitoring in-bound passengers, we noted that usually we receive more than 1000 Chinese tourists on a daily basis, but it got reduced to an average of 40 during this period. This is a temporary phenomenon and I’m sure that similar to how we bounced back from this, the Chinese will also bounce back soon.”

Commenting on the measures taken by the government and the Health Ministry, the Director General said they had always revealed the current situation over the pneumonia epidemic to the public.
 
“We initially took specific measures such as to screen passengers of Chinese flights at the Katunayake Int’l Airport and then when the situation turned bad, we started screening every passenger. Apart from that, we issued brochures in Sinhala, English and Chinese to in-bound passengers, which had facts and safety measures on the outbreak, but it actually looks like a promotion because we had to be positive about this whole saga. That same method was used to give awareness to the common Sri Lankans as well, through local media. We’ve been given positive feedback enormously on how we tackled this issue,” he said.

Dr. Jasinghe said that the only case reported in Sri Lanka has responded remarkably to the treatments and has recovered completely. “But we have still not discharged her due to some concerns on logistics and taking into account the societal concerns. We will discharge her when the time is right,” he said.