MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 08th May, 2020) Multiple factors varying from population density to social norms could have contributed to differences in how the COVID-19 disease spread in different parts of the world and even different areas of one country, Executive Director of World Health Organization's Health Emergencies Programme Michael J. Ryan said on Friday.
According to the WHO official, the virus causing COVID-19 transmits with different degrees of intensity in different regions even within one country depending on the circumstances.
"In mass gatherings and situations when people have been pulled together in large groups, we can see an amplification of disease that can seed the disease in the community very quickly therefore generating a very large wave of infection. And in some situations we have very small waves and the number of infected builds up more slowly. That can occur because of a particular type of event that sort of triggers the transmission among a large number of people in a community at one time, but it can also happen because of the conditions that a community live in," Ryan told a virtual briefing.
He noted that one of such conditions is a number of people who live in a household.
"The transmission of a disease, for example, in somewhere like Sweden versus somewhere like Italy may just as much be affected by the fact that 50 percent of Swedish people live alone in apartments or live in apartments of less than two people, whereas many people in Italy socially live in much larger households. I am not saying that's the reason, but you have to look at population density, you have to look at the way people live, you have to look at the way they interact," Ryan said.
Another factor, according to the WHO official, could be patterns of use of public transport in different areas.
"If the large proportion of people are using overcrowded transit in the middle of respiratory epidemic, you will see more transmission," he said.
Ryan also listed population mobility between areas, social and economic behavior patterns, social norms, as well as degree of compliance with public health and social measures, availability of effective public health response as factors influencing the spread of a disease.
"Disease epidemiology is driven by the natural history of the virus, it's driven by human behavior and it's obviously affected by the public health or the health response to the virus. So it's very hard to make hard and fast rules for what happens in any individual country," the WHO official noted.
There have been over 3.9 million coronavirus cases recorded globally so far, according to the statistics collected by the Johns Hopkins University. Numerous countries have imposed restrictions, including self-isolation, social distancing, temporary shutdown of many businesses, and other measures.
