BREAKING NEWS! US Chief Of Infectious Diseases At NIH Says Current Coronavirus Test Not Accurate! New Details Indicates A Major Challenge Ahead
Source: Thailand Medical News Feb 03, 2020 4 years, 9 months, 3 weeks, 21 hours, 19 minutes ago
Scientifically, it is now confirmed that the new
coronavirus can spread person to person, even if someone is showing no symptoms. The next in line can continue to pass it on. The incubation period is so long that people may not know where or when they picked it up.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, US National Institutes of Health's Infectious Disease Chief
New details that emerged last week about the new
coronavirus from China show how challenging it could be to control this outbreak, health experts say.
Initially, some were relieved that the virus hasn't proved fatal as often as those that caused SARS, Ebola or some other recent menaces. Now there's worry that it still might cause a lot of deaths if it spreads far more than those other viruses did.
Dr Marc Lipsitch of Harvard's School of Public Health told
Thailand Medical News, "The level of concern has been growing with the new revelations about viral spread.”
The
coronavirus has infected at least 17,000 people since it was first detected in central China in late December. It has killed more than 360 and spread to about thirty one countries although most, like the United States, have few cases.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the US National Institutes of Health's infectious disease chief said last Friday at a news conference where quarantines and temporary travel bans were announced, "We still have a low risk to the American public, but we want to keep it at a low risk. Several factors about the virus itself affect how bad the outbreak might become.”
Rapidly Multiplying Infections
From analysis on the first 425 confirmed cases in China, each infection led to 2.2 others on average, Chinese scientists reported last week in the New England Journal of Medicine. That's a bit more than ordinary flu but less than SARS, a genetic cousin of the new virus.
Dr Robert Webster, an infectious disease expert at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital who has studied many outbreaks added, "It sounds and looks as if it's going to be a very highly transmissible virus" Whether the new
coronavirus will weaken as it spreads or instead become better at it isn't known.
Dr Webster added, "This virus may still be learning what it can do. We don't know its full potential yet."
Spreading In Stealth
Currently, the biggest concern is sustained transmission, where one person spreads the virus to another and tha
t person continues to pass it on. A related concern is how often people with no symptoms are infecting others.
Last week, scientists reported that a Chinese woman who was not ill at the time spread the
coronavirus to a man in Germany during a business trip there, and that he in turn infected several other coworkers before showing any symptoms. A child of one of the workers also is infected now.
“This is termed as asymptomatic transmission and puts a terrible burden on the screening process, which has heavily relied on symptoms to detect cases and track close contacts to limit spread, “ said Dr Fauci.
As the virus can move extensively from person to person or without causing symptoms, "it will spread further and perhaps for longer than we initially hoped," said Dr. Ashish Jha, a Harvard University global health professor.
Mortality Rate
The death rate looks like 2% to 3% but could be much lower if many mild cases or infections with no symptoms are going undetected, Dr Fauci said.
The SARS
coronavirus proved fatal in about 10% of cases. The flu's mortality rate is also low, only yet it kills hundreds of thousands around the world each year because it infects millions, Dr Lipsitch noted. So the size of the outbreak can matter as much as the lethality of the virus in terms of how many deaths ultimately occur, he said.
Extremely Long Incubation Period
Medical scientists from China estimate the average incubation period to be roughly five days, but said it could last up to 15 days.
Dr Webster added, “Such a long potential incubation period can be a problem. People can move away from where they contracted it and not even remember places where they may have been exposed.”
Current Diagnostic Testing Not Full Proof
Currently, it's still a struggle to determine who is or is not infected. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a test, but lacks enough confidence in its accuracy to make it widely available. Too little is known about possible method ie throat or nose swabs versus blood or other samples, and how many false alarms or missed cases each might give at any point in time.
Dr Fauci said at the news conference "If we had an absolutely accurate test that was very sensitive and very specific, then we could just test people and say, 'OK, we're good to go,'". "We don't know the accuracy of this test."
Dr Lipsitch added, “That leaves a key gap. Any factor that makes it harder to be sure if someone is a case or not makes control harder."
For more updates about the
China coronavirus epidemic or the
Thailand Coronavirus scenario, keep on checking at:
https://www.thailandmedical.news/articles/coronavirus
