The World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday cautioned that the coronavirus outbreak is getting bigger after Nigeria reported its first confirmed case. The UN health body reiterated its warning that the virus could reach most “if not all countries,” reported Reuters.
The WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier said five more countries including Nigeria, Estonia, Denmark, Netherlands, and Lithuania have reported their first case of COVID-19, all with travel history connected to Italy.
Nigeria is the third African country to have a confirmed case of coronavirus aside Egypt and Algeria and first in West Africa. An Italian citizen who traveled to Lagos became the first confirmed case. He has been placed in quarantine.
“The outbreak is getting bigger,” Lindmeier told during a Geneva news briefing. “The scenario of the coronavirus reaching multiple countries, if not all countries around the world, is something we have been looking at and warning against since quite a while.”
According to the WHO’s latest figures, China has reported more than 80,000 cases since the outbreak began in Wuhan in Hubei province with 2,791 deaths so far. Outside China, 4,351 cases and 67 deaths have been reported in forty-nine other countries.
Lindmeier said the WHO was looking at possibilities of people cured of coronavirus of getting re-infected.
“We need to carefully look at how the tests were taken, how the person was examined if it was maybe overlooked that the person still had the virus somewhere in the residue in the body, whether they got reinfected by different means or ways,” he said.
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the risk of spread and impact of the coronavirus is very high at a global level.
Addressing the reporters in Geneva, Ghebreyesus said the 329 cases reported in China over the past 24 hours made it the lowest there in more than a month.
