Government MP S. B. Dissanayake said Covid-19 was not a disease that people should dread unnecessarily, Daily Mirror reported.
He told the media that 81 percent of people who fell sick are asymptomatic, and another 14 percent only got mild to moderate symptoms.
“Only five percent of them get severe disease. Still, the fatality rate is only 1.9 percent in Sri Lanka. The global death rate is a little over two percent. Therefore, this is not as dreadful as people think. Therefore, one should not strike fear in the minds of people unnecessarily. We should live with it in accordance with health guidelines. We cannot afford to keep the country closed,” he said.
He said more people succumb to cancer and diseases induced by alcohol and smoking than to Covid -19. Also, he said suicides also claim a lot more lives than Covid in the world.
