January 28, 2020
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• The University of Chicago Medical guidelines for influenza define exposure as being within six feet of an infected person for 10 minutes or longer.
• The World Health Organization defines contact with an infected person as being seated within two rows of one another.
• The New England Journal of Medicine noted that the WHO criteria “would have missed 45 percent of the patients with SARS.
• All previous coronaviruses have transmitted through droplets, so it would be unusual if this new pathogen was different.
• The new coronavirus is behaving much like SARS in many respects.
1. Both are zoonotic, meaning they started in animals before jumping to humans, and both appear to have started in bats.
2. The pair also transmit from human to human and have a long incubation period—up to 14 days for the Wuhan coronavirus, compared to about two for influenza—which means that people might be sick and transmitting the disease before symptoms show up.
3. Coronaviruses last longer on surfaces than other illnesses, around three to 12 hours.
4. Preliminary results from Boston’s Children’s Hospital indicate a transmissibility rate for the new coronavirus ranging from 2.0 to 3.1 people. That’s higher than influenza—1.3 to 1.8—but similar to SARS, which has a basic reproduction number in the 2 to 4 range. So, coronaviruses are slightly more prone to spreading between people.
“With flu we have vaccines, a couple antivirals. We don’t have those for this coronavirus.” Arnold Monto, University of Michigan
• Seasonal influenza, …technically kills a relatively small proportion of its cases, with a case-fatality ratio around 0.1 percent.
•The reason the flu is an annual public health emergency is because it infects boatloads of people—35.5 million in the U.S. across 2018 and 2019, which led to 490,000 hospitalizations and 34,200 deaths.
• SARS had a case-fatality rate of 10 percent, about 100 times higher than influenza, and the rate for the new coronavirus is currently near 3 percent, which is on par with the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic.
Influenza so far has caused 8,200 deaths in the U.S.