China reported the sixth death of the new coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan city. So far, over 200 people across Asia have been confirmed infected, including in Japan and South Korea. The number of cases more than tripled over the weekend.
The major escalation prompted the World Health Organization’s decision to hold an emergency meeting on Jan. 22. The agency will decide whether to declare a “global public health emergency,” and if so, what measures should be taken.
Such measures could affect travel, airport security, and hospitals.
The virus has sparked scary memories of the 2003 SARS epidemic originating from China, which eventually infected 8,000 people worldwide.
“My concern is that this really could explode very much the same way SARS did if everybody doesn’t take the proper precautions immediately,” public health analyst Laurie Garrett told NTD.
Garrett was in China during SARS. She said at the time, most of the dangerous transmissions occurred inside the hospitals, in cases where some health care workers weren’t adequately trained and caught the disease themselves during work.
She suggests hospitals should also separate patients with and without fevers, which China did during the SARS epidemic, to prevent cross infections inside hospitals.
Other than infection control training, Garrett said it’s also crucial to track down the source animal species where the virus comes from, as well as figuring out how many asymptomatic infections there are to understand how contagious the disease is.
Human-to-Human Transmission
Chinese state media reported on Monday morning that 14 health care providers had been infected, and the virus is confirmed to pass from human to human.
Dr. Michael M.C. Lai, a leading coronavirus expert in fighting SARS in 2003 in Taiwan, told NTD that the report is “very serious” and “alarming.” He added, “It means that [the] virus can spread very easily.”
Lai said the Wuhan virus is an RNA virus, which can easily mutate during replications. He said the first mutation may have happened and enabled the virus to transmit through humans, instead of only from animal to human.
Lai worries that should another mutation happen; it can cause the virus to be even more contagious and deadly.
He said now it’s crucial to isolate suspected patients who have traveled to Wuhan recently.
“Anybody who has been to Wuhan in the last two weeks should be isolated, should at least be checked, should be aware they might have been exposed to the virus,” Lai said, “They need to check [their] temperature every day. If they have [a] fever, then that’s an indication they may have been exposed to the virus.”
China’s neighboring countries, as well as three U.S. airports, have begun screening people traveling from Wuhan for fevers.
It’s also essential to educate the public to take preventative measures. “Wear [a] mask, wash hands, check body temperatures. These are the key steps in preventing the spread of the virus,” Lai said.
