A top Chinese health official said Sunday that a new deadly virus that has infected nearly 2,000 people and killed dozens in
China is "not as powerful as SARS".
The new virus has sparked alarm amid a rising death toll and the discovery that it comes from the same family of coronaviruses as SARS, which killed nearly 650 people across mainland China and Hong Kong.
"From what we see now, this disease is indeed...not as powerful as SARS," said Gao Fu, head of China's Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, at a press briefing in Beijing.