How New Coronavirus Differs From SARS, Measles And Ebola

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Global health officials have almost as many questions as answers about the mysterious, pneumonia-like virus that originated in China last month and has spread to at least five other countries, including the United States. How exactly is it transmitted? How infectious is it and, most critically, how deadly?

They do know that the new virus is believed to have come from animals sold in a Wuhan market and that it shares many similarities with SARS, the coronavirus that also originated in an animal-to-human transmission in China in 2002, though it does not appear to be as deadly.

Similar to SARS – or severe acute respiratory syndrome, which infected more than 8,000 people and killed nearly 800 before it was mostly contained in 2003 – the new virus spreads through close person-to-person contact. Each infected person seems to spread the virus to about two others, through coughing or sneezing or by leaving germs on a surface that is touched by non-infected people who touch their faces, said Colleen Kraft, who is associate chief medical officer for Emory University Hospital and helped treat the first U.S. Ebola cases in 2014.

The latest report from Chinese health authorities put the death toll from the new coronavirus at 25, with 1,072 suspected cases nationwide.

It is not nearly as infectious as the measles virus, which can live for up to two hours in the air after an infected person coughs or sneezes. Nor does it appear to be anywhere near as deadly as Ebola, which is also much harder to transmit. Ebola is passed largely through direct contact with an infected person’s blood or bodily fluids.

Yet Kraft and global health officials from the World Health Organization cautioned that understanding of the novel virus is still evolving and that the way it spreads and infects people could also change over time.

“The transmission is going to be the same as other respiratory viruses,” Kraft said. “Whether it’s more severe in a person or lasts longer on the surface, those are things that can change. As we learn those things, we can gauge what our panic mode needs to be.”

The WHO on Thursday said it was still too early to declare the outbreak an international public health emergency – a step the international body ultimately took for Ebola in 2014 and Zika in 2016.

Coronaviruses range from the common cold to more-severe diseases such as SARS and Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS. Some coronaviruses, including this new one, can cause severe symptoms and illnesses, including pneumonia.

Yet because there are still so many unknowns, there are many scenarios of how this virus could spread, said Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

An unlikely possibility is that it can be transmitted as readily as the common cold and cause severe pneumonia in a small fraction of people, Frieden said. “That seems quite unlikely, but it would be alarming because it could become like a circulating strain of flu all over the world,” Frieden said.

Another possibility: The virus spreads like SARS – in other words not as readily as the flu – but causes less severe illness than that sister virus. “That would be concerning but not as alarming, and potentially more controllable,” he said.

There is no vaccine or treatment for this coronavirus, but the National Institutes of Health said human trials for a coronavirus vaccine could begin within three months. It is spreading in health-care settings, which officials say is also cause for concern.

“Many things are giving us an advantage, but our disadvantage is the unknown – not fully understanding the disease, its severity and its transmission,” Michael Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s health emergencies program, said at a news conference Thursday.

(c) 2020, The Washington Post · Yasmeen Abutaleb   

{Matzav.com}


3 COMMENTS

  1. Media trying to spread fear and anxiety. This virus is nothing but a common cold with a new fancy name. Every few years they need to come up with a new name for the cold to put panic into everyone. How else can Big Pharma get rid of their flu vaccination shots that people have stopped injecting themselves with?

  2. Some interesting comments from the recent WHO global vaccine safety meeting:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPSpyEi01VI&list=PL9JldIf7HUZTqPbAlsZ6xjnQ_OZP2nQc6&index=1

    Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, Chief Scientist, W.H.O. Pediatrician
    “I think we cannot overemphasize the fact that we really don’t have very good safety monitoring systems in many countries.”

    Professor Heidi Larson, PhD, Director, Vaccine Confidence Project
    “We have a very wobbly health professional frontline that is starting to question vaccine and the safety of vaccines….In medical school, you are lucky if you have a half day on vaccines….We have a lot of ambiguity in the safety field….There’s a lot of safety science that’s needed….You can’t repurpose the same old science to make it sound better if you don’t have the science that’s relevant to the new problem. We need much more investment in safety science.”

    Dr. David Kaslow, PhD, PATH
    “One of the things we really need to invest in are better biomarkers, better mechanistic understanding of how these things work so we can better understand adverse events as they come up.”

    Dr. Bassey Okposen, a doctor from Nigeria, asked if there is a possibility of different vaccine antigens, preservatives, adjuvants, etc., from different vaccine companies cross-reacting with each other and causing problems for children getting multiple vaccines at one time, and whether safety studies have been done on these possible cross-reactions.

    (Partial) answer from Dr. Robert Chen, Scientific Director, Brighton Collaboration
    “…We’re really only in the beginning of the era of large data sets, where hopefully you can start to harmonize the data bases from multiple studies and there’s actually an initiative underway to try to get more national vaccine safety data bases linked together so we can start to answer these types of questions that you just raised….”

    Dr. Martin Howell Friede, PhD, Coordinator, Initiative for Vaccine Research, W.H.O.
    “When we add an adjuvant, it’s because it is essential. We do not add adjuvants to vaccines because we want to do so. But when we add them, it adds to the complexity. I give courses every year on how do you develop vaccines, how do you make vaccines, and the first lesson is, while you are making your vaccine, if you can avoid using an adjuvant, please do so. Lesson two is, if you are going to use an adjuvant, use one that has a history of safety, and lesson three is, if you’re not going to do that, think very carefully.”

    Dr. David Kaslow, PhD, PATH
    “Coming down the pike, maybe relatively quickly, is a new target population for us in vaccines…women who are pregnant…. Part of the problem is that we don’t have a strong enough pharmacoepidemiologic baseline in the targeted populations that we are studying to be able to say, is this an expected adverse event due to pregnancy or is this related to the vaccines?”

    Stephen Evans, Professor of Pharmacoepidemiology, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

    “It seems to me they [adjuvants] multiply the reactogenicity in many instances and therefore it seems to be that it is not unexpected if they multiply the incidence of adverse reactions that are associated with the antigen but may not have been detected through lack of statistical power in the original studies. Now I wonder if this thinking is correct, and if it is, if it has some implications for how we do pharmacovigilance.”

    (Partial) response from Dr. Martin Howell Friede
    “As we add adjuvants, especially some of the more recent ones…we do see increased local reactogenicity. The primary concern though usually is systemic adverse events rather than local adverse events, and we tend to get in the phase two and the phase three studies quite good data on local reactogenicity…but this is not the major health concern. The major health concern which we are seeing are accusations of long-term effects.”
    =======================================================================
    And more from the W.H.O.

    https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=118916866069979

    Professor Heidi Larson, PhD, Director, Vaccine Confidence Project
    “Another new issue that’s coming up, well, the issue is not new but the recognition of it is newer, and that’s when the adverse events are not really about the vaccine but the vaccination experience….I’ve been developing a collaboration with King’s College Institute of Psychiatry and there’s some of the top specialists in psychosomatic illness….I’m very happy to see that we’re about to soon have guidance on immunization stress related responses, which first it was anxiety, then it was immunization triggered stress and that kind of implicated immunizations too much in there, and became immunization stress-related reactions.”

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