Coronavirus updates, everything you need to know

The WHO have given the coronavirus an officially designated name, COVID-19, which stands for “corona virus disease” with 19 referring to when it was first detected, late last year.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the WHO, noted the new name, under international guidelines, makes no reference to any of the people, places or animals associated with the virus. The goal was to avoid stigma.

COVID-19’s current figures are approximately 45,000 infected, 1,116 deaths and 4,985 recovered. Of the active cases (~39,000 infected and under care), it appears 79% are in a mild condition, while 21% are in a serious condition. Of the closed cases, 81% recovered and were discharged, while 19% died.

China on Wednesday reported its lowest number of new cases since late January, lending weight to a prediction that the outbreak could be over by April. China’s foremost medical adviser on the outbreak, Zhong Nanshan, said the numbers of new cases were falling in some provinces, and forecast the epidemic would peak this month. However his previous forecast of an earlier peak turned out to be premature.

“I think it’s far too premature to say that,” said Australia’s chief medical officer, Brendan Murphy, when asked about Zhong’s prediction. “We’ve just got to watch the data very closely over the coming weeks before we make any predictions,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corp, while praising China’s “Herculean efforts” to contain the virus.

In a situation report from the WHO, no new countries have reported cases, however, referring to the spread of virus cases with no travel history to China, Tedros said on Monday “The detection of this small number of cases could be the spark that becomes a bigger fire, but for now it’s only a spark”. He also said, “Our objective remains containment,” and, “We call on all countries to use the window of opportunity we have to prevent a bigger fire.”

Tedros also said “wake up and consider this enemy virus as public enemy number one,” adding the first vaccine was 18 months away.

Meanwhile in Japan, another 40 people; 10 crew, 29 passengers, and 1 quarantine officer, have tested positive on the Diamond Princess, the quarantined cruise ship. The ship, with 174 confirmed patients among its passengers and crew, has become the biggest centre of infection of any place outside China. It has been in quarantine since arriving off the Japanese coast early last week, after the virus was detected in a former passenger who got off in Hong Kong.

Several other cruise ships have been quarantined or turned away from ports because of concerns about infections on board. Notably, a Holland America Line ship called The Westerdam that has roughly 2,000 passengers and crew aboard are stranded on open-seas as five countries, so far, have refused to allow them to dock despite no one on board being diagnosed with the virus.

In the US, errors by a hospital San Diego and the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), lead to a woman with the virus, evacuated from Wuhan on 5th Feb, not being isolated at the hospital. The errors were in labelling specimens that were sent to CDC lab in Atlanta for testing. Swift action by officials has the woman back in isolation. Those who came in contact with her had protective equipment and are being monitored.

The latest scientific discoveries about the virus, according to a study in The Lancet published 6 Feb, suggest that the ocular surface must not be ignored when considering transmission. On Jan 22, Guangfa Wang, a member of the Chinese national expert panel on pneumonia, reported that he was infected by 2019-nCoV during the inspection in Wuhan.

He wore an N95 mask but did not wear anything to protect his eyes. Several days before the onset of pneumonia, Wang complained of redness of the eyes. Unprotected exposure of the eyes to 2019-nCoV in the Wuhan Fever Clinic might have allowed the virus to infect the body.

Usually, a virus spreads to humans through contact with animals. Initially this virus, COVID-19, was thought to have spread from bats as they are the most common carriers of coronaviruses (a family of virus type). However, direct transmission to humans is unlikely. It is thought that as with SARS and MERS, an intermediary animal is usually the one responsible. For SARS, this was the civet cat, while dromedaries helped spread MERS.

Recently, researchers Shen Yongyi and Xiao Lihua of South China Agricultural University in Guangzhou announced in a press conference that they might have identified an intermediary species, the pangolin, saying the virus may have jumped from bats to pangolins and then to humans. The pangolin is a scaly mammal that eats ants and is essentially harmless.

Researchers had shown previously that the new coronavirus is most similar to two other bat viruses; in fact, its genomic similarity to these viruses is 88%, which led scientists to believe that bats carried the new virus. Now, the two researchers used genomic sequencing to compare the DNA of the virus in humans with that in animals and found a 99% match with pangolins.

While many details are still unknown, authorities are racing to gather and process data in order to develop a clearer understanding and speed up delivery of medicine to combat the virus.

On the ground, an advanced team from the WHO is currently in Beijing preparing an international mission to learn everything they can, from  the characteristics of the virus to the public health response China put in place to try to contain it. Understanding the outbreak will guide global response efforts.

SOURCES (REUTERS, SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST, NY TIMES, AFP, WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION, JOHN HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, TIME (MAGAZINE), THE LANCET, MEDICAL NEWS TODAY)