Coronavirus — A New Variety To Worry About
February 3, 2020 at 11:16 p.m.
By -
The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention identified the new coronavirus on Jan. 7 from a patient’s throat swab sample. Since then there have been hundreds of confirmed cases in China, including cases outside Wuhan, with additional cases being identified in a growing number of countries internationally. Most early cases in China worked at or lived around the local Huanan wholesale seafood market.
This is the third time in 20 years that a member of the large family of coronaviruses has jumped from animals to humans and sparked an outbreak. The virus appears to have originated in early December in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people.
On Jan. 20, an official said that 14 health care workers who had treated patients were ill. This was the first clear evidence that the disease could pass from human to human and therefore spread more widely. Between Jan. 17 and 22 the number of confirmed infections grew tenfold. Seventeen patients died during that time.
There are cases in most of China’s provinces. Infected travelers from China have been found in America, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand. On Jan. 23 Wuhan declared a travel ban. The first case in the United States was announced on Jan. 21. As of this writing, there are now five cases that originated in China and the first human to human transfer.
The Wuhan infection is reckoned to have started in an animal market, where it made the jump from animal to human. These markets are fixtures in scores of cities in China where fruits and vegetables, butchered beef, pork and lamb, whole plucked chickens and live crabs snakes, turtles, guinea pigs, rats, bats, otters and other exotic animals are sold.
2019-nCoV, as the Wuhan bug is designated, is a form of coronavirus, a class that gets its name from the viruses’ vague resemblance to crowns or spikes that protrude from their membranes that resemble the sun’s corona. The virus infects many species of mammals and birds, as well as humans. It is very similar to viruses found several years ago in a cave in Yunnan, a province roughly a thousand miles southwest of Wuhan.
The fast spread is startling but not unforeseeable. According to David Quammen in his book Spillover, “that the virus emerged from a nonhuman animal, probably a bat, and possibly passing through another creature may seem spooky, yet it is utterly unsurprising to scientists who study such things.”
Coronaviruses are common in many different species of animals, including camels, snakes and bats. Rarely, these coronaviruses can evolve and infect humans and then spread between humans. Recent examples of this include severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS).
In the 21st century both viruses emerged from their animal reservoirs to cause global epidemics and with alarming morbidity and mortality. Historically human coronaviruses have been regarded as relatively benign causes of the common cold.
In 2002, however, a novel, highly pathogenic coronavirus also emerged in China that caused 8,098 recorded cases of severe SARS, including 774 deaths. The other coronavirus MERS jumped from animals to humans in 2012. Unlike SARS, which has not caused additional human cases since being eliminated within several months of the initial outbreak, MERS continues to smolder due to sporadic transmission from camels.
Before 2002, few outside the field of respiratory medicine would have heard of coronavirus. Then came SARS - it resulted in $30 billion to $100 billion of damage from disrupted trade and travel before the pandemic subsided after more than half a year.
The 2019 coronaviruses tend to cause either a respiratory illness or a gastrointestinal one. Symptoms include fever, severe cough and difficult breathing or shortness of breath. The illness causes lung lesions and pneumonia. Others include confusion, headache, sore throat, chest pain, diarrhea, nausea and vomiting. Milder cases may resemble the flu or a bad cold making diagnosis difficult.
The incubation period is believed to be about two weeks. The illness is more likely to affect older males with other diseases.
Final Thoughts
Several things are still unknown about the Wuhan bug: how easily it can be passed from person to person, how long it takes to incubate and just how lethal it is.
Close monitoring of people who have been infected, and of those in contact with them, should soon help answer some of these questions and make it easier to forecast how dangerous the epidemic will prove to be. The 3% fatality rate among cases confirmed so far is alarming, for it is within the estimated range of the devastating Spanish influenza pandemic in 1918. This was the virus that affected about 500 million people or one-third of the world’s population.
Max Sherman is a medical writer and pharmacist retired from the medical device industry. He has taught college courses on regulatory and compliance issues at Ivy Tech, Grace College and Butler University. Sherman has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge on all levels. Eclectic Science, the title of his column, touches on famed doctors and scientists, human senses, aging, various diseases, and little-known facts about many species, including their contributions to scientific research. He can be reached by email at [email protected].
The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention identified the new coronavirus on Jan. 7 from a patient’s throat swab sample. Since then there have been hundreds of confirmed cases in China, including cases outside Wuhan, with additional cases being identified in a growing number of countries internationally. Most early cases in China worked at or lived around the local Huanan wholesale seafood market.
This is the third time in 20 years that a member of the large family of coronaviruses has jumped from animals to humans and sparked an outbreak. The virus appears to have originated in early December in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people.
On Jan. 20, an official said that 14 health care workers who had treated patients were ill. This was the first clear evidence that the disease could pass from human to human and therefore spread more widely. Between Jan. 17 and 22 the number of confirmed infections grew tenfold. Seventeen patients died during that time.
There are cases in most of China’s provinces. Infected travelers from China have been found in America, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand. On Jan. 23 Wuhan declared a travel ban. The first case in the United States was announced on Jan. 21. As of this writing, there are now five cases that originated in China and the first human to human transfer.
The Wuhan infection is reckoned to have started in an animal market, where it made the jump from animal to human. These markets are fixtures in scores of cities in China where fruits and vegetables, butchered beef, pork and lamb, whole plucked chickens and live crabs snakes, turtles, guinea pigs, rats, bats, otters and other exotic animals are sold.
2019-nCoV, as the Wuhan bug is designated, is a form of coronavirus, a class that gets its name from the viruses’ vague resemblance to crowns or spikes that protrude from their membranes that resemble the sun’s corona. The virus infects many species of mammals and birds, as well as humans. It is very similar to viruses found several years ago in a cave in Yunnan, a province roughly a thousand miles southwest of Wuhan.
The fast spread is startling but not unforeseeable. According to David Quammen in his book Spillover, “that the virus emerged from a nonhuman animal, probably a bat, and possibly passing through another creature may seem spooky, yet it is utterly unsurprising to scientists who study such things.”
Coronaviruses are common in many different species of animals, including camels, snakes and bats. Rarely, these coronaviruses can evolve and infect humans and then spread between humans. Recent examples of this include severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS).
In the 21st century both viruses emerged from their animal reservoirs to cause global epidemics and with alarming morbidity and mortality. Historically human coronaviruses have been regarded as relatively benign causes of the common cold.
In 2002, however, a novel, highly pathogenic coronavirus also emerged in China that caused 8,098 recorded cases of severe SARS, including 774 deaths. The other coronavirus MERS jumped from animals to humans in 2012. Unlike SARS, which has not caused additional human cases since being eliminated within several months of the initial outbreak, MERS continues to smolder due to sporadic transmission from camels.
Before 2002, few outside the field of respiratory medicine would have heard of coronavirus. Then came SARS - it resulted in $30 billion to $100 billion of damage from disrupted trade and travel before the pandemic subsided after more than half a year.
The 2019 coronaviruses tend to cause either a respiratory illness or a gastrointestinal one. Symptoms include fever, severe cough and difficult breathing or shortness of breath. The illness causes lung lesions and pneumonia. Others include confusion, headache, sore throat, chest pain, diarrhea, nausea and vomiting. Milder cases may resemble the flu or a bad cold making diagnosis difficult.
The incubation period is believed to be about two weeks. The illness is more likely to affect older males with other diseases.
Final Thoughts
Several things are still unknown about the Wuhan bug: how easily it can be passed from person to person, how long it takes to incubate and just how lethal it is.
Close monitoring of people who have been infected, and of those in contact with them, should soon help answer some of these questions and make it easier to forecast how dangerous the epidemic will prove to be. The 3% fatality rate among cases confirmed so far is alarming, for it is within the estimated range of the devastating Spanish influenza pandemic in 1918. This was the virus that affected about 500 million people or one-third of the world’s population.
Max Sherman is a medical writer and pharmacist retired from the medical device industry. He has taught college courses on regulatory and compliance issues at Ivy Tech, Grace College and Butler University. Sherman has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge on all levels. Eclectic Science, the title of his column, touches on famed doctors and scientists, human senses, aging, various diseases, and little-known facts about many species, including their contributions to scientific research. He can be reached by email at [email protected].
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