Turkey 'has enough experience to face coronavirus challange'

Turkey may see the first case of coronavirus at any moment but has enough experience to overcome the challenge, according to Professor Önder Ergönül, the chair of the Infectious Diseases and Clinical Microbiology at Koç University's School of Medicine.
The country's diagnostic capacity should be strengthened, said Ergönül, adding that Turkey has a diagnostic facility in Ankara, but should have more centers in other big cities.
Tell us what we're facing and how it differs from previous outbreaks?
The virus was discovered on Jan. 7; since then, we have had more than 82,000 cases, the majority of which are in China. The death toll is around 3,000. The fatality rate is 2 percent.
So this is a virus that spreads easily; it travels very fast compared to the SARS coronavirus [SARS-Cov] and MERS [Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome]. It is the fastest-spreading within the coronavirus family, but not within the influenza family. Influenza viruses spread much faster; during the 2009-10 pandemic of H1N1, there were millions of cases; currently there are far fewer cases.
And also, the difference is that the fatality rate is much lower compared to 2003 [SARS-CoV] and among the coronavirus family. The current [coronavirus], which we call Covid-19, is a very close relative of SARS-CoV. The current fatality rate is 2 percent, whereas in 2003, it was 10 percent and in the Mers coronavirus in 2012, it was 35 percent, although the number of all cases was only 2,500.
Here, we have a high rate of dissemination but a lower fatality rate, and we will remember this outbreak in this terms.
Do you think the high rate of dissemination is behind the global panic?
Yes; there is an overreaction. But we can understand why people...