Wuhan Coronavirus May Be Much More Contagious – And Some Good News
The Coronavirus epidemic is reaching its most interesting phase. But, previous estimates were too optimistic. Experts now think that not only does it spread among humans it may be more contagious than we thought. But the good news is coming as well.
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It Is 2020
Since it is 2020 we can observe the Wuhan Coronavirus in almost real-time thanks to social networks. This may sound like good news but for many, this is quite an anxious experience. And that is bad because stress reduces the effectiveness of the immune system. So let us start with the good news.
We not only have social networks in 2020. We also have powerful machines that read DNA sequences, methods to analyze and create almost anything and a gigantic amount of amazing scientific teams all around the world. But mostly, we do have some experience with coronaviruses such as SARS or MERS. This gives us a pretty big advantage and now its fair game between us and even the worst viruses.
The Good News
But the real good news is about the vaccine for the Wuhan Coronavirus. At this very time, several teams all around the world are working on a vaccine. The key to their success is the published virus sequences. One of the promising projects is the one from the American agency National Institutes of Health (NIH) that is developing an RNA vaccine in cooperation with the biotechnological company Moderna. Their vaccine that corresponds to a structure of a spike virus. They are convinced that they will start producing the vaccine in May – in just four months. Other vaccines are being made at the University of Queensland in Australia and the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. And they say their development should be just as quick.
The one thing we can be sure of is the fact that people standing over Petri dishes and computer simulations are working as hard as they can.
The Bad News
The Wuhan epidemic is still too fresh to give us all the information to evaluate how bad it is. The biggest problem is China and its pathological hiding of information. Many hints suggest that the Wuhan Coronavirus is out there since at least the middle of December but because of China we lost some crucial time and information about the very start of the epidemic.
Just a few days ago experts thought that the average patient infects 1.5 to 3.5 other people. But the newest estimates say that the real number is somewhere between 3 to 5 other people infected per patient. This might seem insignificant but if the number gets confirmed then the Wuhan Coronavirus is much more infectious than initially thought.
At the same time, we now know that at the very least in some cases the disease can be spread even by people who aren't showing any symptoms. This is quite the problem as this means that most currently used security measures will not work.
All of this new information shows us why Wuhan is more dangerous than SARS. Simply put, SARS needed several months to infect a thousand humans. Wuhan infected three thousand in just three weeks and doesn't seem to be stopping there. Researchers from Hong-Kong think that there could be up to thirty more times infected in Wuhan itself that the official numbers released by China.
On the other hand, the lethality of Wuhan Coronavirus seems to be around 2.8 % while SARS killed 9.6 of infected. But it is hard to judge if these are the final numbers. Hopefully, it stays that way and Wuhan doesn't mutate rapidly so we can sleep easily.
Sources:
- https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-01-coronavirus_1_2_3.html
- https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-01-latest-coronavirus-emerging-infections.html
- https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/scientists-are-moving-record-speed-create-new-coronavirus-vaccines-they-may-come-too
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