Coronavirus outbreak: Trump cautioned for insisting deadly virus ‘will be gone by April’

Death toll approaching 1,000 – almost all the cases in mainland China

Medical experts have urged the president to remain vigilant about the danger posed by coronavirus in the US, after he said it would be “gone by April”.

As the World Health Organisation warned the spread of coronavirus cases which had no history of travel to China could be “the spark that becomes a bigger fire” as people across China returned to work after the Lunar New Year holiday, Donald Trump claimed the US was in good shape.

“The heat, generally speaking, kills this kind of virus,” he told a meeting of state governors at the White House.

He added: “A lot of people think that goes away in April as the heat comes in. We’re in great shape though, we have 12 cases, 11 cases, but we’re in very good shape.”

Yet experts in infectious diseases urged caution. While they said it was expected the number of cases would drop, nothing could be taken for granted.

They also said members of the public could help themselves by steps such as getting vaccinated against the flu.

“I think it’s probably too early to say,” said Kate Tulenko, a medical doctor and CEO of Corvus Health, a Washington DC-based medical services, when asked about Mr Trump’s claim cases would be gone by April.

She told The Independent it was likely the US would see an increase in cases over the coming month, but that instances would drop off towards the spring.

She said she understood why there might be a tendency to play down any risk in order to avoid panic. Yet she said official needed to remain alert, and the public could help itself.

“You read all this stuff with people saying ‘it’s only the flu’, or ‘its not as bad as the flu’. Well, 100,000 people die from the flu every year around the world,” she said. “Right now, the most useful thing people could be doing is to get vaccines against the flu.”

Others experts said they shared the president’s hope that cases would go by April, but that nobody could be certain.

William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert Vanderbilt University Medical Centre in Tennessee, and an adviser to the centres for disease control (CDC), also said he hoped the president’s claim was correct.

"I have been saying we have to hope for the best, but prepare for the worst," he said, speaking from Nashville.

"Someone has told the president that respiratory illnesses such as flu tend to recent in the spring, and that is true, But this is a new virus and a new host - humans. It's very difficult to predict. We don't know exactly."

Dean Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, went even further.

“It would be reckless to assume that things will quiet down in spring and summer,” he told CNN.

“We don't really understand the basis of seasonality, and of course we know we absolutely nothing about this particular virus.”

The president’s comments came as the death toll from the epidemic rose to 908, all but two in mainland China, as 97 more fatalities were recorded over the weekend.

The Diamond Princess cruise ship with 3,700 passengers and crew onboard remained quarantined in the Japanese port of Yokohama, with 65 more cases detected, taking the number of confirmed case from the Carnival Corp-owned vessel to 135.

Across China, 3,062 new infections were confirmed on Sunday, bringing the total number to 40,171, according to the national health commission (NHC).

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said there had been “concerning instances” of transmission from people who had not been to China.

“It could be the spark that becomes a bigger fire,” he said in Geneva. “But for now it is only a spark. Our objective remains containment.”

He added: “We should really fight hard as one human race to fight this virus before it gets out of control.”

Additional reporting by Reuters