Cairo: Failure to comply with measures in place against the new coronavirus could result in hundreds of thousands of infections in Saudi Arabia, a health official has warned.
“Unless people show compliance in the next months, hundreds of thousands will be susceptible to infection and the health system will collapse,” said spokesman for the Saudi Health Ministry Dr Mohammad Al Abdel Ali.
“This is not an imaginary scenario. But by compliance, this pandemic will be over, if God wills, and become history,” he added Monday night on Saudi Rotana TV.
“We are facing the danger of moving to the acute stage of the virus spread unless we tighten control with stringent pre-emptive steps,” he added.
On Monday, Saudi Arabia imposed a 24-hour curfew on the capital Riyadh and some other major cities until further notice, the latest steps to contain the spread of coronavirus in the country.
The Saudi Health Ministry Tuesday confirmed 147 new virus cases, raising the kingdom's total to 2,752 infections including 38 deaths.
Dr Al-Abdel Ali also warned that the global threat of the coronavirus is far from over. “The world is not nearing an end to corona. Saudi Arabia is part of it,” he said. “We don’t speak about weeks, but we are talking about months.”
