The Wuhan coronavirus (aka 2019-nCoV) is causing reverberations around the world as new cases and deaths crop up in places far and wide from the original source in Wuhan, China.
Here is a quick synopsis of the rapidly spreading disease —
- The virus is known to be transmitted person-to-person.
- At least 3 cities in China, including Wuhan with a population of 11 millions, have been quarantined, with no travel allowed in and out of the cities.
- Public gatherings and events in Beijing over the Lunar New Year holiday have been canceled.
- Screening has been put in place for passengers arriving from at least some Chinese cities at airports in the U.S. and many other countries.
- The U.S. State Department says to reconsider travel to China, raises its advisory for the country to level 3 amid uncertainty over the spread of coronavirus.
- The World Health Organisation (WHO) will meet again at midday on Thursday in Geneva to decide about whether to classify the new Wuhan coronavirus as a global health emergency.
- The 2019-nCoV causes symptoms similar to SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV.
- The virus incubation period is about 2 weeks — from exposure to symptoms.
- Flu-like symptoms are milder than SARS or MERS, but this, along with the long incubation period, makes it more likely to be spread by patients with mild or no symptoms. The elderly and those with other health problems are more susceptible to complications.
- There is no approved vaccine or antiviral treatment available for coronavirus infection yet (including SARS and MERS).
- As in other similar viruses, the coronavirus is believed to have an original source in some animal, possibly bats or snakes.
Here are some additional sources of information abut the virus and the disease -
Here are some stats. More countries have been added to the list, including Scotland, Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, Australia and Japan.
It will be a monumental task putting cities with such large populations under lockdown.
The city lockdowns have been met with some criticism. It caught the World Health Organization by surprise, who do not recommend such an action. "The most important thing in public health is not to drive the population underground and make them fearful, You want them to cooperate. You want them to report their symptoms.” Unclear about the infectiousness of the virus, the WHO's director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, says he has decided against declaring an international emergency for now, until more is known.
Scenes from Wuhan
Snakes?
Preliminary DNA analysis has identified snakes — the Chinese krait and the Chinese cobra — as the possible original source of the virus. Snakes are also known to hunt and eat bats, which are known carriers of similar viruses. Snakes are known to be sold as food at the animal market in Wuhan where the outbreak started. The market sells poultry, donkeys, sheep, pigs, camels, foxes, badgers, bamboo rats, hedgehogs and reptiles, as freshly slaughtered meats and live consumable animals.
From theconversation.com/… -
The study showed that the virus 2019-nCoV is related to two bat SARS-like coronavirus samples from China, initially suggesting that, like SARS and MERS, the bat might also be the origin of 2019-nCoV. The authors further found that the viral RNA coding sequence of 2019-nCoV spike protein, which forms the “crown” of the virus particle that recognizes the receptor on a host cell, indicates that the bat virus might have mutated before infecting people.
But when the researchers performed a more detailed bioinformatics analysis of the sequence of 2019-nCoV, it suggests that this coronavirus might come from snakes.
Snakes often hunt for bats in wild. Reports indicate that snakes were sold in the local seafood market in Wuhan, raising the possibility that the 2019-nCoV might have jumped from the host species – bats – to snakes and then to humans at the beginning of this coronavirus outbreak.
How the virus could jump and proliferate from warm-blooded bats to cold-blooded reptiles to warm-blooded humans remains a mystery to be solved.
This study is disputed by many other scientists, who argue that the wildlife reservoir must be bird or mammal. “They have no evidence snakes can be infected by this new coronavirus and serve as a host for it,” says Paulo Eduardo Brandão, a virologist at the University of São Paulo who is investigating whether coronaviruses can infect snakes at all. “There’s no consistent evidence of coronaviruses in hosts other than mammals and Aves (birds).”
As of now, this hypothesis is no longer supported by the scientific community. But the hunt for the elusive intermediate animal continues.
Some more info on Coronavirus
- Coronaviruses were discovered in the 1960s.
- Coronaviruses represent 10 to 30 percent of common colds.
- SARS and MERS viruses are also coronaviruses.
- Both SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV originated from bats, in China and the Middle East respectively.
- In the case of SARS, the virus jumped from bats to civet before gaining the ability to infect humans. In the case of MERS, camels served as the intermediate host.
- The Wuhan coronavirus is ~70% genetically similar to the SARS-CoV.
- The new Wuhan coronavirus causes pneumonia. Viral pneumonia is a combination of virus infection of the lungs and our body’s immune response to that damage.
- The Wuhan coronavirus was initially identified during mid-December 2019, as an emerging cluster of people with pneumonia with no clear cause, which was linked primarily to stallholders who worked at the Huanan Seafood Market. en.wikipedia.org/...
- The Wuhan market, where the virus originated, was shut down on Jan.1 to limit the spread of 2019-nCoV, but more cases have since been identified, meaning the virus can also be spread from person-to-person.
- There is no approved vaccine or antiviral treatment available for coronavirus infection yet. Moderna announced on Thursday that it received a grant to begin developing a vaccine for the new virus. But that process will take months to develop and more to test.
- SARS and MERS were contained through symptomatic treatment, isolation and quarantine.
For medical information, check out the CDC site and theconversation.com/… -
A Grim Assessment
Guan Yi, the virologist who identified SARS, offered a chilling perspective on the situation at www.washingtonpost.com/...
A bigger outbreak is certain. Conservatively, this outbreak could be 10 times bigger than the SARS epidemic because that virus was transmitted by only a few “super spreaders” in a more defined part of the country.
I’ve seen it all: bird flu, SARS, influenza A, swine fever and the rest. But the Wuhan pneumonia makes me feel extremely powerless. Most of the past epidemics were controllable, but this time, I’m petrified.
Epilogue
2020 has so far been off to a very rough start — when it comes to weather and natural disasters. We had Australian bushfires, floods in Indonesia, deadly earthquakes in Puerto Rico, heavy rains in east Africa, Angola and Israel and the Taal volcano eruption in the Philippines. All this is on top of the man-made disasters created by the WH and the downing of the Ukrainian airliner.
In this day and age of global travel, it does not take long for an infectious disease to spread exponentially among the populations of the world. Let’s hope the Chinese and UN authorities, and scientists and health workers manage to get control over this Wuhan coronavirus before it becomes a global disaster.
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