Tag: Wuhan Coronavirus

Wuhan Coronavirus/2019-nCoV Update: February 2nd, 2020

Photo by Michael Amadeus on Unsplash

Today, The New York Times reports:

The Wuhan coronavirus spreading from China is now likely to become a pandemic that circles the globe, according to many of the world’s leading infectious disease experts.

The prospect is daunting. A pandemic — an ongoing epidemic on two or more continents — may well have global consequences, despite the extraordinary travel restrictions and quarantines now imposed by China and other countries, including the United States.

Scientists do not yet know how lethal the new coronavirus is, however, so there is uncertainty about how much damage a pandemic might cause. But there is growing consensus that the pathogen is readily transmitted between humans.

The Wuhan coronavirus is spreading more like influenza, which is highly transmissible, than like its slow-moving viral cousins, SARS and MERS, scientists have found.

“It’s very, very transmissible, and it almost certainly is going to be a pandemic,” said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. “But will it be catastrophic? I don’t know.”

…

It is “increasingly unlikely that the virus can be contained,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who now runs Resolve to Save Lives, a nonprofit devoted to fighting epidemics. “It is therefore likely that it will spread, as flu and other organisms do, but we still don’t know how far, wide or deadly it will be.”

One of the biggest questions about this new virus is how lethal it will be:

The biggest uncertainty now, experts said, is how many people around the world will die. SARS killed about 10 percent of those who got it, and MERS now kills about one of three.

The 1918 “Spanish flu” killed only about 2.5 percent of its victims — but because it infected so many people and medical care was much cruder then, 20 to 50 million died.

By contrast, the highly transmissible H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic of 2009 killed about 285,000, fewer than seasonal flu normally does, and had a relatively low fatality rate, estimated at .02 percent.

The mortality rate for known cases of the Wuhan coronavirus has been running about 2 percent, although that is likely to drop as more tests are done and more mild cases are found.

…

An accurate estimate of the virus’s lethality will not be possible until certain kinds of studies can be done: blood tests to see how many people have antibodies, household studies to learn how often it infects family members, and genetic sequencing to determine whether some strains are more dangerous than others.

Closing borders to highly infectious pathogens never succeeds completely, experts said, because all frontiers are somewhat porous. Nonetheless, closings and rigorous screening may slow the spread, which will buy time for the development of drug treatments and vaccines.

Other important unknowns include who is most at risk, whether coughing or contaminated surfaces are more likely to transmit the virus, how fast the virus can mutate and whether it will fade out when the weather warms.

However, it would appear that some doctors are having some success in treating severe cases of illness caused by the Wuhan coronavirus. Reuters reports that Thai doctors have had some success in treating patients infected with 2019-nCoV using a combination of HIV and influenza drugs:

Thai doctors have seen success in treating severe cases of the new coronavirus with combination of medications for flu and HIV, with initial results showing vast improvement 48 hours after applying the treatment, they said on Sunday.

…

The drug treatment includes a mixture of anti-HIV drugs lopinavir and ritonavir, in combination with flu drug oseltamivir in large doses.

The New York Times article I cited earlier says:

In China, several antiviral drugs are being prescribed. A common combination is pills containing lopinavir and ritonavir with infusions of interferon, a signaling protein that wakes up the immune system.

In the United States, the combination is sold as Kaletra by AbbVie for H.I.V. therapy, and it is relatively expensive. In India, a dozen generic makers produce the drugs at rock-bottom prices for use against H.I.V. in Africa, and their products are W.H.O.-approved.

Another option may be an experimental drug, remdesivir, on which the patent is held by Gilead. The drug has not yet been approved for use against any disease. Nonetheless, there is some evidence that it works against coronaviruses, and Gilead has donated doses to China.

Of course, it is still early days, and a great deal more testing and research needs to be done.

Good Sources of Information on 2019-nCoV

Here is my list of good, credible, authoritative resources to learn more about the Wuhan coronoavirus (more formally known as 2019-nCoV):

If you want a quick, up-to-date overview of the current situation, here are three good places to check:

Sources of Fast-Breaking News on 2019-nCoV (WARNING: News You Read Here May Not Be 100% Credible!)

PLEASE READ: In addition to the sources listed in the previous section, there are other places you can check, which might have reports (including translated links to local social media in China) that have not yet made the mainstream news media. Please keep in mind that the situation in China is chaotic, and that some of the information you find in the sources I list below might be gossip, rumours, hoaxes, conspiracy theories, misinformation, or disinformation! 

Please review the information and videos I posted in my blogpost about How to Spot Fake News, BEFORE using any of these links.

Stay healthy!

Wuhan Coronavirus/2019-nCoV Update: February 1st, 2020

(source: BBC)

Yesterday, I provided information from The New York Times on six key factors about the Wuhan coronavirus/2019-nCoV. Today, I share with you an informative article from Vox, which explains in detail two key concepts that researchers are still trying to nail down in these earliest days of the virus outbreak: the basic reproduction number (R0 or R-naught), and the case fatality rate (CFR).

The Jan. 28th Vox article, titled The 2 key questions that will determine if the coronavirus outbreak becomes a pandemic, states:

Less than four weeks into the outbreak, fear about how bad this could get is spreading faster than the virus. And with good reason.

While the vast majority of cases and deaths are occurring on mainland China, 2019-nCoV has already made its way to at least a dozen other countries, including the US, Germany, and Canada. People are buying face masks. Markets are on edge. Cities and countries are responding with mass quarantines and travel bans. The whole thing feels a lot like the 2011 pandemic film, Contagion.

So how big could the outbreak get? Is this the next pandemic — a disease that spreads globally?

An answer to this question requires knowing the answers to two other questions: How easily does the 2019-nCoV spread from person to person, and how deadly is the virus? At the moment, scientists only have informed guesses, which are likely to solidify in the coming weeks and months. But what we know so far is instructive.

I urge you to click over and read the entire article. Between yesterday’s New York Times article and this one, you will be comfortably up-to-speed on 2019-nCoV.

How Do We Deal With Infectious Diseases?

A 2016 article appearing in the scientific journal Physics Reports, titled Statistical physics of vaccination, provides a handy reference chart outlining all the various ways that humanity has responded to limit the spread of infectious diseases throughout history (this image is hosted on Flickr; please click on the link, or the image below, it to see a high-resolution version):

Summary of commonly used interventions against infectious diseases.
Summary of commonly used interventions against infectious diseases (source)

The authors state:

We note that this list is not exhaustive, and interventions are often used in combination, such as contract tracing and isolation.

The eight tactics used to combat the spread of an infectious disease are:

  • Vaccines: treatments which create an immune memory of the pathogen, so that the immune system can respond more vigorously when challenged with the actual pathogen (please note that, as I reported yesterday, we are probably not going to have a readily-available vaccine for 2019-nCoV for at least a year)
  • Antibiotic drugs and antiviral drugs: treatments which interfere with the life cycle of the bacterium or virus within the body of an infected person (for example, there are some reports that antiviral drugs used to treat HIV are being used to treat some patients)
  • Social distancing: closing schools and businesses, avoiding crowded places, etc.
  • Case isolation: asking people who already contracted the infectious disease to stay home; using negative-pressure rooms in hospitals, etc. (note the key difference between isolation and quarantine, the next point, which is applied to potentially infectious people)
  • Quarantine: isolation of individuals who may have already been exposed to the infectious disease, and therefore potentially infectious themselves (this is what China is doing now in many locations)
  • Barrier precautions: masks, gloves, condoms in the case of sexually-transmitted viruses like HIV, etc.
  • Contact tracing: tracking down the contacts of infected individuals to treat, isolate, or quarantine them (at the moment, most countries are devoting many resources to this)
  • Hygiene: hand washing, hand sanitizer, etc.

Dr. Michael Osterholm: “Once it starts to spread, there really is no stopping it”

Now for some bad news. Dr. Michael Osterholm is an internationally recognized expert in infectious disease epidemiology, who led many investigations into infectious disease outbreaks during his 15 years as state epidemiologist at the Minnesota Department of Health. He is currently the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota, and he was interviewed yesterday by the Fox Business News channel (this link is to the 5-minute video, which unfortunately cannot be embedded here).

Dr. Osterholm predicts that this epidemic will likely get a lot worse, given how easily the 2019-nCoV virus seems be transmitted between people. He said in this Fox interview:

It’s acting very much, in terms of transmission, like that of an influenza virus, which means that once it starts to spread, there really is no stopping it, until it decides to stop.

He predicts that hospitals and healthcare systems around the world are going to be overwhelmed with the Wuhan coronavirus in the coming weeks and months, just as those in mainland China are now. Not if, but when.

So, what does all this mean?

Well, referring back to that chart above, we have no vaccine, and we still don’t know how effective existing antiviral treatments will be (although we can expect many scientific research papers to be published as doctors conduct various experiments).

Countries outside China are relying on case isolation and contact tracing to chase down and isolate infected individuals, which may work (although some experts like Dr. Osterholm don’t believe it will be effective enough). Healthcare professionals are using proper hygiene and barrier precautions (personal protective equipment such as masks, gloves, eye protection, etc.) to avoid becoming infected with the virus themselves while treating patients. Many civilians are also starting to use barrier protections when out in public.

That only leaves two approaches which we will begin to see more of in the coming weeks and months: social distancing and quarantine. What this means for you, reading this now, is that you need to prepare yourself and your family for the possibility that you will need to stay in your homes for a period of several weeks, avoiding contact with as many other people as possible, as a wave of illness caused by the Wuhan coronavirus sweeps through your community, forcing schools, businesses, and public transportation and public gathering places like movie theatres and shopping malls to close (as we already seen in Wuhan and many other cities in China). The time to prepare for this is NOW.

I hope that this discussion has convinced you that you do need to start taking this seriously. That means that you need to prepare by stocking up on food and other supplies to last you at least two or three weeks. Start by reviewing the Personal Health Preparedness lists provided by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention here.

You will need to have on hand:

  • At least two weeks of food and other supplies (toilet paper, first aid supplies, soap and hand sanitizer, garbage bags, etc.). Hardcore, doomsday preppers would argue that you also need to store enough water for each person to last 2 or 3 weeks, but I think it is unlikely that we are going to lose public utilities in first-world countries, such as electricity, water, and sewer services, during an epidemic/pandemic. If stocking up on water makes you feel less anxious overall, do it.
  • Refills of all your presecription medications, plus a stock of over-the-counter medicines (talk to your doctor and pharmacist about creating an emergency supply of your prescription medication). You might not be able to get out to your pharmacy because of the imposition of social distancing and quarantines to stop the spread of the virus.
  • Power sources (flashlights, extra batteries, car chargers and adapters for your mobile devices, a battery-operated or hand-crank radio if the electricity or Internet do go out, which I still think is unlikely).

Other things that you should do:

  • Sign up for any local alerts from your city, state/province, or federal government (or know where to find the information on the Internet). Find out what plans your employer is making.
  • If you haven’t yet, get your seasonal flu shot. It can’t hurt, and it will help to figure out whether or not you do have 2019-nCoV if/when you do become sick. Many areas now give out the flu shot for free.
  • Watch the following video from the World Health Organization on how wash your hands! (Yes, I’m serious. And stock up on soap. This will also help you avoid catching regular colds and influenza.)

Good Sources of Information on 2019-nCoV

Here is my updated list of good, authoritative resources to learn more about the Wuhan coronoavirus (more formally known as 2019-nCoV):

If you want a quick, up-to-date overview of the current situation, here are three good places to check:

Sources of Fast-Breaking News on 2019-nCoV (WARNING: News You Read Here May Not Be 100% Credible!)

PLEASE READ: In addition to the sources listed in the previous section, there are other places you can check, which might have reports (including translated links to local social media in China) that have not yet made the mainstream news media. Please keep in mind that the situation in China is chaotic, and that some of the information you find in the sources I list below might be gossip, rumours, hoaxes, conspiracy theories, misinformation, or disinformation! 

Please review the information and videos I posted in my blogpost about How to Spot Fake News, BEFORE using any of these links.

Stay healthy!

Wuhan Coronavirus/2019-nCoV Update: January 31st, 2020

Illustration of a 2019-nCoV virion (source: Wikipedia)

Today I bring you some up-to-date information about the Wuhan coronavirus, courtesy of The New York Times newspaper and the British Columbia (Canada) Centre for Disease Control.

I have extracted some key information from The New York Times article published today: How Bad Will the Coronavirus Outbreak Get? Here Are 6 Key Factors (Please note: the NYT is one of those irritating news websites which only offers you a few free articles per month before a paywall comes up, which is why I have quoted more than I usually do):

1. How contagious is the virus?

It seems moderately infectious, similar to SARS. The scale of an outbreak depends on how quickly and easily a virus is transmitted from person to person. While research has just begun, scientists have estimated that each person with the Wuhan coronavirus could infect somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5 people without effective containment measures.

2. How deadly is the virus?

It’s hard to know yet. But the mortality rate is probably less than 3 percent, much less than SARS… Early indications suggest the mortality rate for this virus is considerably less than another coronavirus, MERS, which kills about one in three people who become infected, and SARS, which kills about one in 10. All of the diseases appear to latch on to proteins on the surface of lung cells, but MERS and SARS seem to be more destructive to lung tissue. As of Jan. 31, fewer than one in 40 of the people with confirmed infections had died. Many of those who died were older men with underlying health problems.

3. How long does it take to show symptoms?

Possibly between 2 to 14 days, allowing the illness to go undetected… Officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that the Wuhan coronavirus has an incubation period of 2 to 14 days. But it is still not clear whether a person can spread the virus before symptoms develop, or whether the severity of the illness affects how easily a patient can spread the virus.

4. How much have infected people traveled?

The virus spread quickly because it started in a transportation hub. Wuhan is a difficult place to contain an outbreak. It has 11 million people, more than New York City. On an average day, 3,500 passengers take direct flights from Wuhan to cities in other countries. These cities were among the first to report cases of the virus outside China.

5. How effective will the response be?

The W.H.O. has praised China’s efforts, but critics fear lockdown measures may not be enough.

6. How long will it take to develop a vaccine?

A vaccine is still a year away — at minimum.

A coronavirus vaccine could prevent infections and stop the spread of the disease. But vaccines take time.

After the SARS outbreak in 2003, it took researchers about 20 months to get a vaccine ready for human trials. (The vaccine was never needed, because the disease was eventually contained.) By the Zika outbreak in 2015, researchers had brought the vaccine development timeline down to six months.

Now, they hope that work from past outbreaks will help cut the timeline even further. Researchers have already studied the genome of the new coronavirus and found the proteins that are crucial for infection. Scientists from the National Institutes of Health, in Australia and at least three companies are working on vaccine candidates.

“If we don’t run into any unforeseen obstacles, we’ll be able to get a Phase 1 trial going within the next three months,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Dr. Fauci cautioned that it could still take months, and even years, after initial trials to conduct extensive testing that can prove a vaccine is safe and effective. In the best case, a vaccine may become available to the public a year from now.

This last point is important to grasp: there will not be a quick-fix vaccine for the Wuhan coronavirus anytime soon.

The British Columbia Centre for Disease Control issued a series of tweets addressing misconceptions being spread on social media about how the Wuhan coronavirus is transmitted:

The receptors for coronavirus are deep in a person’s lungs – a person must inhale enough of the virus that it can actually bind to those receptors deep in the lungs. Coronavirus is transmitted via larger droplets that fall quickly out of the air (for example, after a sneeze). This virus is not airborne.

Coronavirus is not something that people can get from casual contact. A person must be in close contact (within 2 metres) with somebody to be able to inhale those droplets if a person coughs or sneezes without cover, in front of them.

The droplets can fall to the ground after a sneeze and a person can touch them with their hands. The risk of transmission is low in this case, as those droplets must be of significant enough quantity to make it to the receptors in a person’s lungs. If a person has touched something that has droplets on it with coronavirus in it, as long as they clean their hands before touching their face or your mouth, they are not at risk of getting that virus in their body. Coronavirus is not something that comes in through the skin. This virus is remitted through large droplets that are breathed deep into a person’s lungs.

How Can I Prepare for 2019-nCoV?

Again, your best, most common-sense prevention strategy is to wash your hands, well and often, and avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth with your unwashed hands, since you could potentially pick up 2019-nCoV from surfaces on which other people have coughed or sneezed.

If you haven’t yet, please watch this short, one-minute video from WHO which explains the best technique to wash your hands to ensure that they are free from the virus. You might think you already know how to wash your hands, but you might be surprised at what you don’t know:

There is a great deal of debate among experts as to whether or not face masks will be helpful to prevent 2019-nCoV infection. Some Chinese cities are asking their citizens not to venture outside without wearing a mask. And stocks of face masks have been selling out in stores around the world, as well as via online retailers, so they could be difficult to obtain for many people. The B.C. Centre for Disease Control says:

Regarding wearing masks – masks should be used by sick people to prevent transmission to other people. A mask will help keep a person’s droplets in. It may be less effective to wear a mask in the community when a person is not sick themselves. Masks may give a person a false sense of security, and are likely to increase the number of times a person will touch their own face – to adjust the mask, etc. The most important thing that a person can do to prevent themselves from getting coronavirus is to wash their hands regularly and avoid touching their face.

My advice is, that if you can obtain personal protective equipment (PPE) such as face masks, gloves, and eye protection, and if you learn how to put them on and take them off properly, then they might make you feel less anxious if you do have to go outside and interact with other people if/when a wave of the 2019-nCoV is sweeping through your community.

At the present moment, there is absolutely no need for such precautions here in North America, and it is unlikely that the situation will change drastically over the next few weeks. However, you should probably go and stock up on soap and hand sanitizer, of which you will probably be using a lot more! Use this time to practice how to wash your hands 😉

Good Sources of Information on 2019-nCoV

Here is my updated list of good, authoritative resources to learn more about the Wuhan coronoavirus (more formally known as 2019-nCoV):

If you want a quick, up-to-date overview of the current situation, here are two good places to check:

Sources of Fast-Breaking News on 2019-nCoV (WARNING: News You Read Here May Not Be 100% Credible!)

PLEASE READ: In addition to the sources listed in the previous section, there are other places you can check, which might have reports (including translated links to local social media in China) that have not yet made the mainstream news media. Please keep in mind that the situation in China is chaotic, and that some of the information you find in the sources I list below might be gossip, rumours, hoaxes, conspiracy theories, misinformation, or disinformation! Please review the information and videos I posted in my blogpost about How to Spot Fake News, BEFORE you using any of these links.

Stay healthy!

Editorial: Welcome to the New Normal

A man lies dead in the street in Wuhan, China (source: The Guardian)

Between Australian bush fires, presidential impeachment hearings in the U.S. Senate, and the Wuhan coronavirus, 2020 is shaping up as a year to remember (not in a good way)—and January isn’t even over yet! This could be a long, long year.

Over the course of one week, I have switched from being a social VR/virtual worlds blogger to a Wuhan coronavirus blogger! Welcome to the new normal, folks. Expect me to flip back and forth between these two completely separate topics for the next little while.

It’s a good thing that I branded this blog with my own name, rather than a preset topic like “Social VR Blog”. It means I can be flexible as needed. So, I have updated the tagline for my blog accordingly:

I will be continuing my daily news update on 2019-nCoV, with links to the best, most credible information resources, so you can stay up-to-date on what’s going on as this virus continues its spread around the world.

And (to get my often-anxious mind off the topic), I will continue my blogposts about Sinespace, Second Life, and other virtual worlds and social VR platforms. It’s still my passion, it still engages me, and I will certainly be continuing that coverage.

I also need to work on my presentation at the upcoming Educators in VR conference which, unlike conferences which take place in real-world locations, is very unlikely to be affected by the flight cancellations and other logistical problems imposed by the Wuhan coronavirus!

So, as you can see, I’ve got lots to keep me busy over the next little while. Stay tuned, and stay healthy!