Coronavirus has killed more than 2,000 people across the world as the World Health Organisation (WHO) has announced it will take at least 18 months to have a vaccine ready. The latest rapid spreading of the deadly infection has been in Italy as Austria is considering introducing border controls with the country. Virologist Dr Mike Skinner has worryingly claimed travel bans are “not watertight”.

Speaking to Express.co.uk, Mr Skinner said: “I think larger airlines impose their own bans, partly for commercial reasons.

“There’s a cost to imposing those travel bans and then the bans are never really watertight.

“They will drive people underground and they will come to realise it is hard to monitor.

“I think between what the airlines did and what the Chinese authorities did, I think that’s probably as effective as we could reasonably hope for in these circumstances.”

Mr Skinner has previously warned there is a 50 percent chance of catching the virus in London.

In recent weeks, hospitals throughout Britain have created “isolation pods” in a bid to keep anyone tested for the virus separate from other patients, with strenuous efforts being made to track down everybody these people have come into contact with.

So far in the UK, there are 13 confirmed cases of the illness.

He said: “When you’ve got very small numbers of cases like this you’re dealing with chance.

“It can go one way or the other. You can’t put any statistics on it.

“Somebody has tried to model the likelihood of an infection becoming established depending on the number of inductions.

“They came out with figures of by the time you get to 10, you may get a 50 percent chance of getting an established infection.

“But we also must look at the number of cases we’ve got and a number of inductions.

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“We know we have a super spreading event where a number of people were infected from the same source.

“It counts as primary, that one person coming back from Singapore is one event.

“We’ve still got a relatively small number of events. It’s still 50/50.

“Worst case is it gets established and it starts spreading at a level where the public health starts breaking down.”

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