The coronavirus from Wuhan, China is so new it doesn’t have an official name yet, and it’s spreading. It’s a virus so antibiotics don’t work against it. The Chinese government has been slow to react and its natural habit of suppressing bad news hurts efforts to fight its spread. So how scary is this, and what can we expect next?
The short answer is that we don’t know but there are clues from the last couple of times something like this happened. In “What we know about the coronavirus spreading in China and elsewhere”, the Washington Post’s Lena H. Sun and Miriam Berger compare it to the two most recent coronaviruses, SARS and MERS. SARS started spreading in China in November 2002, infected 8000 people and killed 774 worldwide, and was finally contained in summer 2003. MERS started in the Middle East in 2012 and has killed 790 people since then. Both outbreaks were contained by isolating patients, as there is no cure for these viruses.
If we’re lucky, the new disease will afflict and kill fewer people than SARS and MERS did. But we may not be lucky, which is why federal health authorities are screening some airline passengers in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. In “The Test a Deadly Coronavirus Outbreak Poses to China’s Leadership”, Javier C. Hernández contrasts China’s meticulous censorship of news articles and social media posts about the outbreak to the blunt remarks of Dr. Zhong Nanshan, who leads the government-appointed experts helping to control the outbreak. Zhong was the one who revealed that the new virus can spread from person to person, and that one patient infected 14 medical workers.
In Wuhan some people are now wearing masks through the day, and a few are leaving the city. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published interim guidance for preventing spread of the virus. If you have the virus, you should:
- Stay home except to get medical care.
- Keep away from other people.
- Call ahead before visiting a doctor.
- Wear a facemask.
- Cover your coughs and sneezes.
- Wash your hands.
- Don’t share dishes, drinking glasses, etc.
The CDC has further bits of advice for those in close contact with victims.