Some of the highlights of this week

The WHO named the new coronavirus – COVID-19, with the ‘CO’ for corona; ‘ VI’ for virus; ‘D’ for disease; and ‘19’ for the year of outbreak. The name, in keeping with international recommendations and to prevent stigmatization, scrupulously avoids any reference to a particular geographical location, animal species or group of people.

The disease is a "very grave threat" to the world but there is a "realistic chance" of stopping it, according to the WHO which has only declared it as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) but not a pandemic. (An epidemic is the occurrence of more cases of a disease than would be expected in a community or region during a given time period, while a pandemic is the worldwide spread of a new disease. The last pandemic was the 2009 H1N1 swine flu.

The infected numbers in Hubei Province rose sharply, as China changed the way it tested for the virus and many heads rolled in a purge of officials who were handling the crisis. Now a trained medical professional can classify a suspected case of COVID-19 as a clinically-confirmed case on the basis of chest imaging, without laboratory confirmation.

Major research funders and more than 300 scientists and researchers met under the aegis of the Global Research Collaboration for Infectious Disease Preparedness (GloPID-R) at a two-day forum on February 11 & 12 in Geneva and set priorities for COVID-19 research. They had discussed a wide range of issues including the natural history of the virus, its transmission and diagnosis, animal and environmental research on the origin of the virus including management measures at the human-animal interface, treatment, vaccines and ethical considerations for research and integration of social sciences into the outbreak response.