slingbadger wrote on Mar 13
th, 2020 at 6:37am:
Mersa wrote Yesterday at 12:00am:
Of course this is a real thing, but so was sars and the swine flu
I got to ask what is the difference between coronavirus all these viruses because I don't remember such measures been taken in the past(maybe I don't remember well). Was there already a vaccine for them?
MERS ,SARS illnesses and this 'novel coronavirus' SARS-CoV-2 are all 'coronaviruses', there are many of these which affect various animals including farm and domestic, but currently seven of them infect humans.
Because it involves mention of SARS, you are mostly seeing the term COVID-19 used instead. The latter refers to the
illness not the
virus.
They all look similar under the electron microscope, and reproduce once they are inside a cell in very similar ways. This new one seems to be closely related biologically to the original SARS virus, (it is now very easy in the lab to read the genetic information of a virus and compare it with others, not that easy only 15 years ago) and the clinical manifestations (severe pneumonia) are SARS-like.
The main difference between this and SARS in terms of its spread is that there is a lengthy period after infection when the person has no symptoms, during which they can obviously travel around, and in which they can be highly infectious to others. This time currently estimated at around 5 days, but could be longer in some cases. SARS you typically were recognized as being very sick before you were majorly infectious to others.
I think the so-called 'screening' of temperatures which popped up at airports around the world missed most of the infectious cases passing through - I havn't seen any information about how many people were stopped by these measures or the follow up on them.
It also may be (I think it is the case) that there are a significant number of people that are/were infected and infectious but whom never developed any symptoms that took them to a doctor.
Edit: The early results from China suggested about 17% to 20% of people who catch this disease at least badly enough to see a physician progress to needing hospitalizations.
- (corrected the percentages - not as scary as I mistakenly wrote before)
Vaccines take a lot of time (and money
) to develop. Currently there are trials on antiviral treatments, but there will not be a vaccine this year. Vaccines are potentially dangerous and unpredictable, you need to test very carefully that they don't cause more harm than good. That's what these 'clinical trials' are about. Even so - those trials will be starting in the U.S. and probably elsewhere in the next few weeks (there are many vaccine candidates), but they will take months to complete. This will be the fastest in the history of the world that a vaccine has gone into trials, so the NIH/CDC (in U.S.) and others are not hanging about here.
The Chinese have been experimenting with all kinds of treatments, but it's not yet clear how successful they are.
The bottom line for the difference between this and MERS and SARS? Those don't spread nearly as easily as this one does. On the other hand this one is not as fatal. 'Ordinary' 'flu kills about 0.1% of those infected. This new virus seems likely to be significantly more dangerous. The current 'gut feel' estimate from people I trust is about 1-2%.
It is also pretty clear now that, like the 'flu, this predominantly causes serious harm to older people from late 50's onwards, although there are exceptions! Children appear to be less affected by it than the usual 'flu. However, one always has to worry about mutations getting around that might make the virus even more infectious, or more harmful. If this eventually infects around 1 billion people (1/6 of the world's population and probably a significant underestimate) that is a heck of a lot of little mutation experiments going on. I think currently there are two distinguishable strains going around.