Ed note: This virus is moves from person to person with “droplet nuclei.” The best advice–wash your hands; if sick stay away from others; but don’t panic, current risk in the USA is low at this time.
The [Coronavirus] shows signs of spreading overseas, with people who never visited China falling ill in Germany, Japan, Taiwan and Vietnam.
- “Bats are thought to have been the source of the coronavirus that caused severe acute respiratory syndrome, which killed 774 people in a 2003 SARS outbreak, as well as the one that led to Middle East respiratory syndrome, which caused 282 deaths in the MERS outbreak that began in 2012.”
- The fact that several early patients had never been to the market was the first hint that it might have been spreading among humans before Dec. 12, 2019, when Chinese authorities first took note of the infection.
- The first signs of illness appeared three to six days after a person was exposed to someone else who was sick. Respiratory distress set in eight to [fifteen] days after exposure.
- A virus will genetically “shift” as it travels from person to person.
- The average number of people who will catch a disease from one infected person, a measure called R0 (or “R-naught”). That number for 2019-nCoV is not yet known with any certainty.
- Lancet studies reckoned that an infected person might spread it to between 1.5 and 3.5 others — a number that would make it much less contagious than measles, which has an R0 of 12 to 18.
- China has quarantined 50 million people.
- If 2019-nCoV turns out to be as lethal as SARS or MERS,
that would not be reassuring. SARS had a 9.5% case fatality rate before it
was quickly stamped out in 2003. And MERS has a case fatality rate of
34.4%. Both viruses were (or still are, in the case of MERS) largely
contracted in hospitals, so many of their victims were very sick before
they became infected.
- Among the first group of 41 Chinese patients hospitalized with 2019-nCoV infection, six died. That’s a case fatality rate of close to 15%.
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