Talking to a Virologist About How Worried We Should Be About Coronavirus

That’s not on purpose or anything, but people aren’t so self-aware that they’re going to notice a single sneeze, or every little cough, or clearing their throat, or their nose is running and they think it’s allergies. We just need to be very cautious in interpreting the data that comes out and also scrutinize it closely.A great example of this is one of the first reports of the basic reproduction number for the virus, the R0 [“R naught,” the number of people that an infected person will infect]. When people pick stuff like that up and report it — “Oh, this is way worse than SARS, we’re all going to die!” — that’s a really irresponsible way of reporting that data. What really determines how big of a public-health crisis this is going to be, in the absence of fear and panic and all of the things that can come along with that, is how many people end up getting severe pneumonia. Before we can determine what the overall risk is going to be globally, we need to see the circumstances in which this is being transmitted in other countries that it has been exported to.My biggest concern is that if it is highly transmissible, and there is a high incidence of severity, and it starts spreading in countries that have less health-care infrastructure and less ability to respond, then I think it can become a very large problem. Right now it’s looking like 15 to 25 percent of people have severe disease. I think that some of the cases that have been reported, we need to look at the proportion of those that are getting the severe disease. That’s going to give us a lot to go on as far as how bad the crisis is going to be.Say what now?That’s the ballgame, againMore major fallout from the coronavirus outbreakBiden, Sanders, and Klobuchar will be thrilledThat’s one way of putting itWell, that’s somethingThe real news is that he was still IN the raceState is taking serious precautions regarding American travel to ChinaThis transmission in Chicago brings the total number of people in the U.S. with coronavirus to sixU.S. health officials confirmed on Thursday the nation’s first person-to-person transmission of the coronavirus … The new patient is the husband of the Chicago woman who brought the infection back from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the outbreak, CDC and Illinois health officials said during a press briefing.