Hong Kong virologist Guan Yi was pessimistic that the outbreak could be 10 times worse than SARS
The number of confirmed cases in the new virus outbreak in China reached 5,974 today, overtaking the number of people infected in the country by the SARS epidemic from November 2002 to 2003, AFP reports.
China's National Health Commission reported more than 1,400 confirmed new cases today, as the death toll climbed to 132. There were 5,327 confirmed cases in mainland China during the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome ( SARS) epidemic.
That outbreak killed more than 770 people globally, including 349 in mainland China.
Meanwhile, renowned University of Hong Kong virologist Guan Yi told mainland media that Wuhan may have missed the golden opportunity to contain the disease spread.
He was pessimistic that the outbreak could be 10 times worse than SARS.
A key part of our health defense is to stop probable cases at the border.
The SAR's first case was intercepted at the West Kowloon express rail terminus. The second case, however, was able to slip through the monitoring due to a lack of identifiable symptoms.
It is most likely that Hong Kong will see more cases in the coming days with the risk of so-called "invisible patients" becoming a greater cause for concern.
While the health chief should review the system regularly to boost the defense line, people in general must react to the changing situation calmly and not panic.
Meanwhile, issuing a statement about nCoV and our pandemic exercise the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, noted that “in October 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted a pandemic tabletop exercise called Event 201 with partners, the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.”
“Recently, the Center for Health Security has received questions about whether that pandemic exercise predicted the current novel coronavirus outbreak in China. To be clear, the Center for Health Security and partners did not make a prediction during our tabletop exercise. For the scenario, we modeled a fictional coronavirus pandemic, but we explicitly stated that it was not a prediction. Instead, the exercise served to highlight preparedness and response challenges that would likely arise in a very severe pandemic. We are not now predicting that the nCoV-2019 outbreak will kill 65 million people. Although our tabletop exercise included a mock novel coronavirus, the inputs we used for modeling the potential impact of that fictional virus are not similar to nCoV-2019,” the centre clarified.
Meanwhile, Huang Chaolin, vice director of Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital, revealed in a recent interview with business magazine Caixin that there might be multiple places from which the virus was first transmitted to humans.
Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital is one of Wuhan's designated hospitals for infected patients. Huang and his team have recently published a paper in the Lancet, the world's leading general medical journal, about some early findings on the clinical data of the first 41 novel coronavirus cases.
The first patient, who was admitted to Huang's hospital on December 1, 2019, had no direct exposure to Wuhan's Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which was previously considered as the source of the epidemic. His family had no fever or respiratory symptoms, according to the paper.
Among the following three patients who were admitted on December 10, two had no exposure to the seafood market. In total, only 27 of the 41 cases had exposure to the marketplace, said the paper.
"Judging from the whole situation, the seafood market may not be the only source. [The origin of the novel coronavirus] might be multi-source," Huang said. But so far, there are no clues about other sources.
( SLG Health Desk)
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