A scientific commission tackling the threat the coronavirus poses to Turkey believes it will wane with the onset of warmer weather, Turkey's health minister said Thursday.

On Twitter, Fahrettin Koca said the novel coronavirus seemed to have the form of a winter infection.

"If we can implement all necessary measures to prevent the virus from propagating, daily life will probably return to normal within two months," he said.

After months of successfully halting the entry of the virus across its borders despite countries across the world seeing cases rising sometimes into the hundreds, Turkey announced its first case of the novel coronavirus early Wednesday, diagnosed in a man who had recently returned from a trip to Europe.

The commission's predictions that the global coronavirus pandemic would be likely to end by the summer echoed those of Zhong Nanshan, the Chinese government's senior medical adviser, who on Thursday set June as the likely time by which the epidemic will have waned.

Many of the imported cases into China have come from asymptomatic patients, while rates of re-infection among recovered patients are low, Zhong, an 83-year-old epidemiologist renowned for helping combat the SARS outbreak in 2003, announced in a news conference.

Since originating in Wuhan, China last December, the coronavirus has spread to more than 100 countries.

The global death toll is now almost 4,600, with more than 124,500 confirmed cases, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), which has declared the outbreak a global pandemic.