Heading Toward a New Pandemic?

"There are still many gaps in our understanding. The pieces of the puzzle that is 2019-nCOV are only now beginning to come together."
"The exposure and possible infection of health workers remain extremely worrying."
Lancet medical journal editorial

"[People might be infected without knowing it] really tracking and containing this thing could be very difficult, because lots of people are capable of spreading it even if they don't have symptoms themselves."
"[The next one to two weeks] will tell the tale of whether this becomes a real global problem or stays mostly geographically isolated."
Matthew Miller, associate professor, Michael G.DeGroote Institute for Infectious Diseases Research, McMaster University

Workers manufacture protective face masks in a factory in Hubei Province, January 23. Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak.

This is a fast-moving public health situation, the Wuhan novel coronavirus was detected in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people mere weeks ago when the first victims were seen with a puzzling new virus resembling SARS, whose cause baffled health professionals in the city. It was soon recognized in the coronavirus family like SARS, but different, and those differences are still revealing themselves. So far, the virus has been diagnosed in people in various parts of the globe, and spreading rapidly.

Most of its victims have been diagnosed in China, from Wuhan primarily, the epicentre of the epidemic, said to have been seen first among workers from the Wuhan open air live market, since closed down. Details are slowly emerging, but updates are continuous and it is now known that diagnoses have been made beyond China, in Nepal, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, France and the United States.

China is rapidly going into lockdown; many of its megacities are now in quarantine condition, public transportation is at a standstill, and people are advised they may not leave their cities to enter others and nor may any others from outside enter theirs. It has been seen that the infection causes clusters of fatal pneumonia mostly among the elderly who contract it. Of the original 41 cases, six people have died. Five of that number of 41 developed acute cardiac injury; four required mechanical ventilation.

Medical staff of Union Hospital affiliated with Huazhong University of Science and Technology form an "assault team" on January 22 to tackle Wuhan novovirus.

The Lancet journal published a number of papers. One study by Chinese scientists tracked a family of six from Guangdong province who visited Wuhan in late December and early January of whom five were infected along with another member of the family who hadn't travelled with them to Wuhan. Indicating to scientists the first evidence of human-to-human transmission. A child of ten, who wore a face mask during the visit was infected as well, but was without symptoms.

Medical staff transfer a patient of a suspected case of a new coronavirus at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Hong Kong, China Jan. 22, 2020. cnsphoto via REUTERS

The disease is seen to have a three-to-six-day incubation period, with the troubling onset of fever, cough and muscle pain. Some who become infected experience the disease mildly, while older people develop severe infections requiring intubation and intensive care. Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of the World Health Organization feels "it has not yet become a global health emergency", with WHO closely tracking ongoing events to be prepared to rule otherwise.

Since the first alert of December 30 of four unexplained cases of pneumonia in Wuhan linked to the seafood market known to sell live animals for slaughter and human consumption, over 835 cases have been confirmed in China, 41 of them fatal, with a total of 1,400 cases seen globally. Although mystery remains about the source of the infections, the virus is most closely recognized as related to coronaviruses from Chinese horseshoe bats. Chinese cuisine is comprised of a range of exotic beasts; speculation is that the Chinese cobra which is a bat predator might have been the vector in this case.

Sixteen health-care workers, mostly working in the same wards as those infected, contracted the virus. The published studies are an early start in understanding as much of the details as are needed to help cope with this new virus that is already proving able to mutate to other strains. That most people who contract the novel coronavirus fail to experience classical symptoms such as a running nose or sneezing may complicate the spread of the virus.

"Sneezes and runny noses are a prime way for people to spread infections", noted Paul Hunter, professor of medicine at Norwich Medical School,University of East Anglia, United Kingdom.