The New Coronavirus Is a Truly Modern Epidemic

On Thursday, Nahid Bhadelia left rural Uganda, where she had been helping to set up a center for studying viruses such as Ebola. Before she left, she was peppered with concerned questions about when 2019-nCoV—the new coronavirus that has rapidly spread through China—would appear there. The virus had already reached 23 other countries, and when Bhadelia arrived in Amsterdam on Friday morning for a layover, she noticed that a quarter of the people in Schiphol Airport seemed to be wearing face masks. When she landed in Paris for a second stop, she paused to deal with the barrage of tweets and emails that she had been getting about the new virus. “I’m not as worried by the disease as from people’s reactions to it,” she told me over Skype. “People are freaking out.”

The virus emerged in the city of Wuhan in December, and has infected more than 17,200 people. The large majority of cases have been in mainland China, but more than 140 have been detected elsewhere. At least 361 people have died in China, and one in the Philippines. In response, the World Health Organization recently declared a “public-health emergency of international concern” (PHEIC)—a designation that it has used on five previous occasions, for epidemics of H1N1 swine flu, polio, Ebola, Zika, and Ebola again. The invocation of a PHEIC is a sign that the new coronavirus should be taken seriously—and as the sixth such invocation in a little more than a decade, it is a reminder that we live in an age of epidemics.

Each new crisis follows a familiar playbook, as scientists, epidemiologists, health-care workers, and politicians race to characterize and contain the new threat. Each epidemic is also different, and each is a mirror that reflects the society it affects. In the new coronavirus, we see a world that is more connected than ever by international travel, but that has also succumbed to growing isolationism and xenophobia. We see a time when scientific research and the demand for news, the spread of misinformation and the spread of a virus, all happen at a relentless, blistering pace. The new crisis is very much the kind of epidemic we should expect, given the state of the world in 2020. “It’s almost as if the content is the same but the amplitude is different,” Bhadelia said. “There’s just a greater frenzy, and is that a function of the disease, or a function of the changed world? It’s unclear.”

Certainly, the new epidemic has grown at a pace unprecedented in recent history. The official case count has more than tripled within the past week, from about 4,500 on Monday to more than 17,200 now. In Wuhan, the number of ill people is straining the health care system, testing kits are in short supply, and hospitals are so full that some patients are being sent home to quarantine themselves, Amy Qin of The New York Times reports. The virus seems to have rapidly eclipsed SARS, which infected only about 8,100 people throughout eight months in 2002 and 2003.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/the-new-coronavirus-is-a-truly-modern-epidemic/ar-BBZBwFi?ocid=msn360