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Amid growing public anxiety about an outbreak of a new coronavirus originating in China in late January 2020, various media outlets reported on a dire warning that suggested the virus could kill 65 million people annually. The Daily Mail, for example, reported that health experts had predicted the virus could kill 65 million people in a year. The publication later issued a correction and updated its article. Such stories were prompted by a mock pandemic health exercise run by Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security on Oct. 18, 2019. But that exercise did not predict the current virus would kill 65 million people. Johns Hopkins released a statement countering the viral news stories (emphasis added): According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that are common in many different species of animals, including camels, cattle, cats, and bats. Rarely, animal coronaviruses can infect people and then spread between people such as with MERS and SARS. The coronavirus that was first reported in Wuhan, Hubei Province, in China, is a respiratory illness dubbed 2019-nCoV that had killed 213 people in China as of this writing. On Jan. 30, 2020, the World Health Organization declared it a global emergency. Chinese authorities have quarantined 50 million people in an unprecedented effort to contain the virus.
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