“This week we should start to see the effects of the containment strategy”, Ben Cowling, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Hong Kong, tells TIME.
“Does this virus have pandemic potential? From our assessment, not yet”, said WHO director – general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. The Centres for Disease Control ( CDC ) announced on Saturday it was initiating preparations for a ” likely ” spread of Covid-19 in the United States.
“Those efforts by health workers to track where infected people and their close contact.”
Keiji Fukuda, the director and clinical professor at the School of Public Health, told Business Insider his concern with the spread of the virus. If containment only slows the virus, eventually you get “community spread” : people are infected without knowing how they were exposed, so you can’t quarantine all contacts. “If we still hospitalize and isolate every suspect case, our hospitals will be overwhelmed”, he said.
But there remain eight locally transmitted cases with no clear epidemiological link, such as travel history to China. It’s likely mixed in the cold and flu season all over the place, in multiple countries and gone unnoticed until someone gets severely ill. The vast majority are people who came from Wuhan.
The World Health Organisation ( WHO ) has already declared a global health emergency. For the moment, we are not witnessing the uncontained global spread of this virus [ or ] large scale severe disease or death.
A joint WHO – China mission has concluded its work, after travelling to several provinces, including Wuhan, epicenter of the outbreak. It found that the epidemic peaked and plateaued between 23 January and 2 February, and has been declining steadily ever since. The WHO chief described the sudden increase of cases in Italy, Iran and South Korea as “deeply concerning”. We must focus on containment while doing everything we can to prepare for a potential pandemic.
In a press conference on Feb. 11, the WHO said a vaccine could be ready in 18 months. People with a mild case of the coronavirus recover in about two weeks, the WHO said. What makes this even more complicated is that the symptoms of a coronavirus infection are very similar to the flu.
The World Health Organization announced Thursday declared the new coronavirus outbreak a global emergency. The strain emerged in December 2019 and has been traced back to a live animal market in the capital of China’s central Hubei province, Wuhan late last month, officials announced Wednesday night. It has developed different features compared with the early stage, and the prevention and precautionary measures need to change accordingly. Dr. David Heymann, who headed WHO’s global response to SARS outbreak, said the new virus, but hope they will buy patients some time.
Before that, international emergencies were declared in 2016 Ebola outbreak, when returning travellers from West Africa. In comparison, the SARS virus killed about 10 % of people who caught it. COVID-19 estimated the death rate is hovering at about 2 percent. Using the word “pandemic” now does not fit the facts, but it may certainly cause fear. The 2003 SARS epidemic cost the global economy $ 40 billion, whilst the 2009 swine flu outbreak and the 2014 – 16 West African Ebola epidemic, cost $ 50 billion and $ 53 billion, respectively.
Coronaviruses belong to a family known as Coronaviridae, and under an electron microscope they look like spiked rings. Some are responsible for disease, like the common cold. When they make the jump to humans, they can cause severe respiratory illness that causes a fever, cough and shortness of breath.
In currently identified patients, there seems to be a spectrum of illness : A large number experience mild pneumonia – like symptoms to that flu – like feeling of being hit by a train. China is also running a small clinical trial of Kaletra, an anti – HIV drug, according to The Guardian. The novel coronavirus does spread and infect humans slightly differently to the flu, but because it predominantly affects the respiratory tract, the protection measures are quite similar.
You may also be considering buying a face mask to protect yourself from contracting the virus. As COVID-19, also known as coronavirus, continues to spread, the head of the United Nations health agency said that there is still a chance to prevent a broader global crisis. The coronavirus family hasn’t reached that stage.
Based on the way the virus spread in China, investigators believe each infection led to 2.2 others on average. That’s a bit more than ordinary flu but less than SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, a genetic cousin of the new virus.
Dr. Michael Ryan spoke at a news conference in Geneva after returning from a trip to Beijing to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping and other senior government leaders. Referring to China, he said the virus was attacking about out four of every 100,000 people, even within its epicenter in Wuhan city and surrounding Hubei province.