Chinese Viral Outbreak Could Be ‘10 Times the Scale of SARS,' Expert Says

A Chinese man wears a protective mask as he sleeps before boarding a train before the annual Spring Festival at a Beijing railway station in Beijing, China, on Jan. 23, 2020. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

A leading infectious disease expert has warned that the Wuhan virus could be 10 times worse than the SARS outbreak which killed almost 800 people in 2002 to 2003.

Guan Yi, director of the State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases at Hong Kong University in Hong Kong, said in a Jan. 23 interview with Chinese financial magazine Caixin that his “conservative estimate is that the epidemic could end up at least 10 times the scale of SARS.”