MOSCOW, April 29. /TASS/. One person diagnosed with COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, may infect from two to four people, head of the First Moscow State Medical University’s Epidemiology and Evidence-Based Medicine Department Nikolai Briko said on Wednesday.”There is another important figure: the basic reproduction number and the contagiousness index. It is reported at about 2-4% with the coronavirus. That is, one infected person may infect from two to four people. Seasonal flu has the basic reproduction index of about 1.5%,” he said during a press conference titled “What we do not know about COVID-19.”Briko added that the novel coronavirus is not very stable in an external environment, however, it produces several times more pathogenic particles than its predecessor, coronavirus SARS-CoV. “The infectious period [of the novel coronavirus] is sometimes rather long. We need to understand why causative agents are still emitted after recovery. The incubation period is five-seven days on average, however, it can be longer,” the expert added.In late December 2019, Chinese officials notified the World Health Organization (WHO) about the outbreak of a previously unknown pneumonia in the city of Wuhan, in central China. Since then, cases of the novel coronavirus — named COVID-19 by the WHO — have been reported in every corner of the globe, including Russia.On March 11, 2020, the WHO declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. According to the latest statistics, over 3,100,000 people have been infected worldwide and more than 218,000 deaths have been reported. In addition, so far, over 959,700 individuals have recovered from the illness across the globe.To date, a total of 99,399 coronavirus cases have been confirmed in Russia, with 10,286 patients having recovered from the virus. Russia’s latest data indicates 972 fatalities nationwide. Earlier, the Russian government set up an Internet hotline to keep the public updated on the coronavirus situation.
