Two months into the epidemic, the coronavirus has not proven to be as deadly as the SARS virus. That, however, may also help explain why it’s spreading so quickly. It has an incubation period of up to two weeks, which enables the virus to spread through person-to-person contact.
The coronavirus, a highly contagious, pneumonia-causing illness that infects the respiratory tract, was responsible for 259 deaths in China, with 46 new deaths reported in the previous 24-hour period, and 11,791 infections worldwide, according to the latest figures released by China’s National Health Commission on Saturday (late Friday, EST).
SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, infected 8,096 people worldwide with approximately 774 official SARS-related deaths; most of those infections occured during a nine-month period from 2002 to 2003. Even with 43 new fatalities reported over 24 hours, the fatality rate remains steady.
SARS had a fatality rate of 9.6% compared to the fatality rate of 2.2% for the coronavirus.
SARS had a fatality rate of 9.6% compared to the fatality rate of 2% for the coronavirus, which has remained steady for the last several weeks. However, that death toll could rise as the weeks progress, and drug companies scramble to come up with a vaccine for the virus. Whether the fatality rate remains steady has yet to be determined.
The difference in these two fatality rates gives more context as to why the coronavirus has spread so quickly. Medical experts say an effective flu-like virus can extend its reach by not killing its host too rapidly and/or making the host sick enough to pass it on before finally becoming bedridden.
“Every now and then a disease becomes so dangerous that it kills the host,” Matan Shelomi, an entomologist and assistant professor at National Taiwan University, wrote on Quora in 2017. But, ideally for the host at least, it must strike a balance.
“If the disease is able to spread to another host before the first host dies, then it is not too lethal to exist. Evolution cannot make it less lethal so long as it can still spread,” he added. “If a hypothetical disease eradicates its only host, both will indeed go extinct.”
‘The strain of the Black Death plague (Yersinia pestis) from the 14th Century was too virulent and is now extinct.’
That, he said, is why the Black Death, which ravaged much of Europe and Asia in the Middle Ages is now extinct. “The strain of the Black Death plague (Yersinia pestis) from the 14th Century was too virulent and is now extinct,” with only modern, less devastating strains in existence.
Animals are useful for viruses to jump humans. “The animal is the disease reservoir,” Shelomi wrote. “Even if all humans were vaccinated against such a disease, we’d need to vaccinate the animal reservoir too in order to eradicate the disease, which is impractical if not impossible.”
Sean Beckmann, assistant professor of Biology at Stetson University in Florida who is an expert in zoonotic infections, which jumped from animals to humans, told the life-science website BioSpace.com that there’s still a lot we don’t know about the new strain of coronavirus.
“It isn’t something that looks like it can hang out on surfaces or in the air for a long time and still be infectious,” he said. “It looks like it requires pretty close contact, which is why outside this epicenter in China we’re not seeing a lot of human-to-human transmissions.”
“This does not look like a virus that is able to stay alive in the air or on surfaces for a very long time. Which is good,” he added. “
Other far more deadly viruses have taken more than half a century to become a global epidemic. For instance, it’s widely understood that HIV originated in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo around 1920 when the virus crossed over from chimpanzees to humans.
“Up until the 1980s, we do not know how many people were infected with HIV or developed AIDS. HIV was unknown and transmission was not accompanied by noticeable signs or symptoms,” according to Avert.org, a global information and education resource on the disease.
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HIV/AIDS has an incubation period of 40 to 60 days, although that can vary wildly. “The current epidemic started in the mid to late 1970s,” Avert said. “By 1980, HIV may have already spread to five continents. In this period, between 100,000 and 300,000 people could have already been infected.”
But the virus took hold in the years following the sexual revolution, with the first reported cases in the U.S. among gay men in 1981 and intravenous drug users. Untreated, it has a fatality rate of almost 100%. To date, 75 million people have contracted HIV with an estimated 32 million deaths.
Like HIV, the coronavirus has created its own brand of fear and loathing. Rumors about whether it began in a food market in Wuhan have led to allegations of racism against Chinese people in Canada, the U.K., Malaysia and South Korea, and elsewhere, and xenophobic comments online.
Chinese President Xi Jinping told the World Health Organization head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus this week, “Chinese people are currently engaged in a serious struggle against an epidemic of a new type of coronavirus infection. The epidemic is a demon, and we cannot let this demon hide.”
Other deadly viruses have taken more than half a century to become a global epidemic.
However, reports that more than half-a-dozen doctors first discussed the threat of a potential coronavirus outbreak in early December only to be silenced by the local Communist Party has led critics to speculate that more could have been done after the first diagnosis.
Yaxue Cao, founder and editor of the political pressure group ChinaChange.org, said a Wuhan doctor said in a WeChat group in late December that there were “7 cases of SARS connected to the seafood market.” He was then scolded by the party disciplinary office, and forced to retract that, Cao said.
“From the same report, we learned that Wuhan health authorities were having overnight meetings about the new ‘SARS’ at end of December,” Cao posted on Twitter Jan. 27. “Earlier today the Wuhan mayor said he was not ‘authorized’ to publicize the epidemic until Jan. 20.”
Wuhan mayor Zhou Xianwang said 5 million people had left the city before travel restrictions were imposed ahead of the Chinese New Year. Ma Xiaowei, the director of China’s National Health Commission, said that the virus had an incubation period of 10 to 14 days.
China has taken major steps to help prevent the spread of the virus. Officials in Wuhan, a city of 11 million residents that is widely regarded as the epicenter of the illness, last week closed the area’s outgoing airport and railway stations and suspended all public transport.
Chinese officials have since expanded that travel ban to 16 surrounding cities with a combined population of more than 50 million people, including Huanggang, a neighboring city to Wuhan with 7.5 million people, effectively putting those cities on lock down.
Beckman also told Biospace.com that efforts to contain coronavirus happen in three stages: “You get containment and trying to reduce the spread as much as possible. You get the development of symptomatic treatment, things like antivirals. And the third one, and the more long-term process, is vaccine development. And that’s because vaccine development takes quite a bit of time.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday that it has confirmed the first case of person-to-person spread of coronavirus in Illinois. There were six confirmed cases of coronavirus in the U.S. as of Thursday, two of which are in Illinois.
The sixth case is the husband of the first confirmed case in Illinois, a woman in her 60s. The husband did not travel to Wuhan, China, the city that first identified the novel coronavirus.
According to figures provided by WHO on Friday, there are confirmed cases in 25 countries in addition to China, including Germany, Japan, Vietnam, and the U.S., the U.K. and Russia. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday that there are 241 people under investigation, 114 of which have tested negative for the coronavirus.
“There are likely to be many times more cases in Wuhan than officially confirmed,” Neil Ferguson, a disease modeler at Imperial College London, told The Wall Street Journal. The paper also said some families have voiced their concern and frustration that their relatives’ cause of death was marked as “severe pneumonia” or “viral pneumonia” on their death certificates.
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