COVER STORY/CORONAVIRUS

THE LUNAR New Year break has been uncomfortably long and quiet for almost 50 million people in China. Since January 23, the authorities have locked down some 13 cities, including Wuhan in the province of Hubei, which is the epicentre of the deadly coronavirus outbreak. Public transport and ride-hailing services have been suspended in this city of 11 million people. Trains and flights from the city have been suspended and people have been asked to leave their houses only for essential reasons like stocking up food. At places, the police has employed drones to ensure that people stay indoors. Travel restrictions and quarantine measures have also left streets, parks and shopping centres deserted in a dozen other cities, including Chibi, Zhejiang, Huangshi, Xiantao, Enshi, Qianjiang and Xiannning. The country’s largest metropolis, Shangahi, resembles a ghost city. As many criticise the government’s draconian enforcement of epidemic control laws, the government says the measures are to contain the spread of the virus that poses a “grave threat” as there is no preventive vaccine or cure for it.

But if only travel restrictions and lockdowns could stop this virus. A week later, the School of Public Health at University of Hong Kong, published a paper in The Lancet which said infections may have spilled over to other cities even before the lockdown happened and “the epidemics are already growing exponentially in multiple major cities of China with a lag time behind the Wuhan outbreak of about 1-2 weeks”. “Travel restrictions and lockdowns often only delay transmission, not stop it. Transmission is occurring as expected for a respiratory disease that is contagious in very dense urban areas,” says Nathan Grubaugh, a virologist at the Yale School of Public Health, USA. As of February 10, the new coronavirus—named COVID-19 by the World Health Organization (WHO) almost one-and-a-half month after the virus was first identified—had infected 42,638 people and killed 1,018 in 27 countries. Most of them are in China. On February 10, Hubei reported 103 deaths in 24 hours.

The toll could further rise as at present, 3,000-4,000 new cases are being confirmed every day. “Some of these cases are likely a backlog in testing and the daily case reports may present onsets that happened weeks ago,” says Grubaugh. There are other reasons, too. The symptoms are deceptively similar to common cold—the classical symptoms include fever, cough and fatigue. In some people, the virus can remain asymptomatic for up to 14 days and thereby, spread stealthily. Besides, Chinese authorities have been notorious for keeping information under wraps. Consider this. A mathematical model developed by the Johns Hopkins University, USA, to gauge the spread of the virus, estimates that 58,000 people would have been affected in China by January 31. Though government data puts the figure at 11,791, it is difficult to believe given the government’s track record. On December 30, 2019, Li Wenliang, a doctor in Wuhan, is believed to have first disclosed about the virus to his medical school alumni group on the popular Chinese messaging app WeChat. The same day, the city’s municipal health commission infor

med medical institutions about the patients but warned them not to release treatment information to public. Though on December 31, Wuhan’s health authorities announced the outbreak and alerted WHO, Li was reprimanded by the police for “spreading rumours online” and “severely disrupting social order”. The whistleblower succumbed to COVID-19 a week later.

NEW BUT FAMILIAR ENEMY

The virus is not entirely new to scientists. It belongs to a large family of viruses that have taken the world by storm earlier. In November 2002, a strain of coronavirus, named the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS),

was first isolated from patients in southern China suffering from pneumonia-like symptoms. Then too, China had kept the illness a secret for months. SARS travelled across 24 countries, killing 800 people and infecting another 8,000 before it was contained in July 2003. Almost a decade later, another strain of coronavirus caused the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in Saudi Arabia. It spread to 27 countries killing 912 people and infecting 2,400 before being contained in 2014. But

People in Indonesia being sprayed with an antiseptic after they arrived from Wuhan, China, where the virus originated

29 30

* 25 * 13 28 24

24 23 23 26 24 30