VIRUS SHUTS DOWN CITY
Effort to control outbreak
The city at the centre of a mystery virus sweeping through China and beyond has been locked down in an effort to contain the fast-moving outbreak.
From Thursday morning Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, will effectively be in quarantine with air, bus, ferry and rail terminals closed to prevent the spread of the disease.
The outbreak of the novel coronavirus, which emerged in the central Chinese city in December, has infected at least 551 people and killed 17.
The announcement of the lockdown came as the World Health Organization Wednesday delayed a decision on declaring a global health emergency.
An emergency meeting of the WHO will reconvene Thursday to discuss whether to sound a warning that would mean affected countries must report cases and give the organization power to impose trade and travel restrictions.
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the WHO, said the decision to declare an emergency should not be taken lightly.
“(The decision) is one I’m only prepared to make with appropriate consideration of the evidence,” he said.
Adhanom Ghebreyesus would not be drawn on whether or not he thought putting Wuhan in effective quarantine was a good idea. “We will need some time to understand the specific measures that are being taken,” he said.
The majority of cases of the pneumonia-type illness have been in China, but there have been four cases reported in Thailand as well as single cases in the United States, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Mexico. Russia has also reported a suspected case.
The novel coronavirus comes from the same family as the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus that went around the world from 2002 to 2003. That, too, emerged in China, eventually infecting around 8,000 people and killing at least 774 people worldwide, including 44 in Canada.
Despite rumours that a Toronto-area teenager who recently travelled back from Wuhan province might have contracted the coronavirus, the Public Health Agency of Canada and Toronto Public Health said late Wednesday that there were no confirmed or suspected cases in Canada.
Experts say that, among the many unknowns is the severity, true extent or nature of transmission and the death rate.
While the virus’s genome sequence has about a 71 per cent similarity to SARS, there’s a significant difference between the strains, said Dr. Dick Zoutman, who chaired the Ontario SARS scientific advisory committee during the 2003 outbreak. “It’s difficult on the basis of that to predict exactly how it’s going to behave.”
The WHO meeting “will tell us if we were getting all of the information, because if suddenly what was 300 cases is now 1,700 cases, we need somebody to explain to us how that happens,” said Zoutman, emeritus professor in the departments of pathology and molecular medicine at Queen’s University.
The human race has an instinctive fear of contagion, he said. “We understand, as human beings, the concept of germ theory. We all have a healthy respect for the fear of contagion,” he said.
Canada’s chief public health officer said earlier this week that the risk to Canadians of contracting the virus remains low, but airports in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal — all of which have direct flights from China — would begin screening passengers.
The disease, which preliminary research has linked to snakes, is thought to have originated in an animal market in Wuhan, 1,000 kilometres south of Beijing, but officials were still unsure which animals were transmitting the virus and how fast it was spreading from human to human. The virus causes a pneumonia-type illness, leading to fever, coughing and breathing difficulties. It’s spread through coughing and sneezing.
Disease modelling carried out by researchers at Imperial College in London showed that thousands of cases may have not yet been identified, with as many as 4,000 people in the city at the epicentre of the outbreak likely to have been infected.
Neil Ferguson, professor of mathematical biology at Imperial, said that over the coming weeks the number of cases would increase rapidly.
“It will be much more complicated to estimate for the whole of China,” he added.
Authorities in China warned Wednesday that the virus was already “adapting and mutating.”
George Fu Gao, director-general of China’s centre for disease control and prevention, said: “The virus gradually adapted once it was transmitted from the animals (to humans), and we need more time to study further.” At the moment, however, children and young people do not appear to be susceptible to the virus, Gao added.