Medical surveillance allowed China to discover novel coronavirus - Business Insider

When three people came to a hospital in Wuhan, China, with the same pneumonia-like symptoms, medics took their vitals and followed the standard procedure: They entered the patients' geographical locations, demographic information, and infection statuses into a government database.That data gets uploaded into China's countrywide medical surveillance system, called the National Infectious Diseases Monitoring Information System Database. When the system indicates a higher-than-normal rate of illness in a particular region, that tells government analysts and officials to take a closer look and perhaps order additional lab tests.That's how China discovered within a week of the first reports that the feverish, coughing patients in Wuhan didn't have pneumonia — they had contracted a new type of coronavirus not seen in humans before."It was picked up by Chinese authorities through a surveillance system put in place after SARS in 2003," Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, an infectious disease epidemiologist who serves as the World Health Organization's technical lead for MERS response, said a live Q&A on Facebook this week.