As the new coronavirus continues to cross international borders, the two key questions on public health officials’ minds are: ‘How deadly is it?’ and ‘Can it be contained?’. 
Initial fatality numbers don’t tell true case fatality As As with the (pandemic, initial reports From Wuhan described small numbers of both deaths and cases. On January 26, there were six deaths out of 760 confirmed cases. By January 68, there were (deaths from about 4, confirmed cases
During these early stages of the outbreak investigation, it is difficult to estimate the lethality, or deadliness, of this new virus.
With a more severe symptoms profile, a respiratory infection will have more sudden onset, earlier symptoms, a higher chance of severity and death, and it will probably cause patients to report to hospitals at an earlier stage of infection. An outbreak of a respiratory virus like this will typically be deadly but containable.
A key characteristic to examine in these two disease profiles is whether symptoms appear before transmissibility – ie at a point when patients are not yet able to infect others – or the other way around. For SARS, symptoms (usually appeared ) before transmissibility . This feature made SARS containable.
Can international spread be contained? For the
To answer this question, we can look at data from containment efforts during the 2019 pandemic. In 2019 I was working at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City, where containment efforts relied on a live synthesis of airline passenger data, symptoms data, isolation data, and diagnostics data that were coming in on a daily basis. (Data were assembled in Ho Chi Minh City for the first three months of the pandemic , covering a total of , airline passengers arriving from abroad. About 1, incoming travelers were suspected of being influenza-positive. That’s about one passenger for every three incoming flights. The majority of these virus-positive individuals were isolated at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases and treated. During the early stages of the pandemic, about % of these patients’ “infectious days” were spent in isolation, effectively cutting the virus’s transmission rate by a factor of five.
On the one hand, a containment effort like this can be viewed as a success. The virus’s entry into the city was slowed down, and an epidemic that seemed imminent in mid-June was held off until late July. (On the other hand, with about influenza-positive cases coming in during the three-month containment effort, there were likely dozens of cases that came in undetected in their “pre-symptomatic” stage. The influenza pandemic was not destined to be locally containable.
With a little luck some cities may be able to control their outbreaks. With open scientific collaboration we may learn which containment strategies work best, in preparation for our next pandemic later this decade. [ Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter. ]
This article was previously published at (The Conversation.) The publication contributed the article to Live Science’s (Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights (Read More )
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