“We were really, really keen to know what this virus was,” WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan said. But some cases had no link to the market. Other customers had also fallen sick, and the market had been shuttered. He had patronized a seafood market in Wuhan where live animals were sold. The first to die of the disease that came to be known as covid-19 was a 61-year-old man with chronic liver disease. 10, 2020 41 cases, 1 death ‘This virus still is controllable’ In a medical journal editorial headlined “Another Decade, Another Coronavirus,” he noted that the virus binds to the same cellular receptor used by SARS1, and people would probably spread it only after becoming symptomatic with an infection deep in the lungs. Perlman, for one, figured this new virus would be like SARS1: deadly, but limited in its ability to spread. Would this become a pandemic virus? Few experts assumed so then. Perlman, Neuman and other members of an international committee of coronavirologists decided it should be given a derivative name: SARS-CoV-2. Most of the genetic differences “were in places that didn’t seem like they would matter very much,” Buchmeier said. When Chinese scientists uploaded the genomic sequence of this novel coronavirus, it looked strikingly like SARS.
SARS had been scary, but it was contagious only when people were already very sick, and patients could be isolated. (Koki Kataoka/Yomiuri Shimbun via AP Images) 25, 2020, during the Lunar New Year holiday. Security staff in protective clothing check the body temperature of passengers at the entrance of a subway station in Beijing on Jan. He was sending a news story to two fellow scientists, Stanley Perlman of the University of Iowa, and Benjamin Neuman of Texas A&M University at Texarkana. Buchmeier, a professor at the University of California at Irvine, wrote in a Jan. “Don your spacesuits, comrades!” Michael J. That was the same type of virus that caused SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, which flared in China in 2003 and killed nearly 800 people worldwide before the outbreak was contained. 5, 2020.įour days later, Chinese news reports said the illness was caused by a coronavirus. “Pneumonia of unknown cause - China” declared the bulletin the WHO distributed Jan. And “unknown etiology”: Chinese doctors knew it wasn’t influenza or any other obvious pathogen. On the final day of 2019, Van Kerkhove received an email with news of a mysterious pneumonia outbreak in a cluster of 44 hospitalized patients in Wuhan. 31, 2019 44 suspected cases, 0 deaths ‘I was wrong about it’
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