Mike Ryan, head of the World Health Organization's emergencies programme, said on Friday that an outbreak of pneumonia in Kazakhstan, reported to be highly lethal, was "certainly on our radar".
But he also said it was possible it might be COVID-19.
"The upward trajectory of COVID-19 in the country would suggest that many of these cases are in fact undiagnosed cases of COVID-19," he told an online briefing from Geneva.
(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay and Michael Shields in Geneva; Writing by Kevin Liffey; Editing by Edmund Blair)
