Evolution and identification - Coronavirus outbreak - Covid-19 pandemic (2020)

Coronavirus outbreak - Covid-19 pandemic (2020)

Evolution and identification

The new corona virus that jumped at the end of last year from some animal to a person in the city of Wuhan has managed to attract huge attention from the media, scientists and the international community in just a few weeks. The epidemic is developing very rapidly and with it we have the knowledge of this new virus. The scientific community has managed to isolate it from not understanding anything at the beginning of 2020, sampling it, identifying it and creating a diagnostic test.

As with each new outbreak, however, there are many open questions that will be addressed as the disease progresses and as scientists continue to get a better grasp of the nature of the virus. In this episode, we will try to provide steady updates on the most important virus and epidemic information. The World Health Organization launched a strategic plan this week to respond to the novel corona virus it has declared an "international public health emergency" as the first person in the U.S. with a confirmed case of illness from the hospital went home.

According to the World Health Organization, with more than 30 000 confirmed cases in China, the Covid-19 virus has killed more than 600 people, disrupted global travel and prompted governments and other organizations to take extreme measures to prevent its global spread, from evacuations to mass quarantines. It is not currently spreading beyond people in close touch with returning Wuhan travelers within the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

Researchers are working to understand this new threat and warn current public health efforts, including the potential creation of a vaccine, including how the virus is evolving and moving from person to person. Infectious-disease specialists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, such as Dr. Trevor Bedford, are among the scientists at the front lines of that research effort. Bedford, a computational biologist who studies how viruses grow and spread, is gaining information about Covid-19 which he hopes will help save lives from this emerging respiratory virus disease.

While he studied the spreading virus, Bedford shared what he has learned so far with the public through media interviews, the open-source platform for real-time viral evolution monitoring by his team. Here are examples of what he and other experts have learned so far— and the critical questions they are still pursuing:

How to reduce the risk of infection?

Signs

What to do if you think you may be infected?

Tips for travelers to and from China, the epicenter of the outbreak

How U.S. health officials respond to the virus

What doctors and healthcare workers need to know

Bedford's and other analyzes of the genetic sequences of some of the first human cases found that after it first appeared the virus had a surprising lack of genetic diversity from person to person. First, there was not sufficient evidence to clarify what this meant — was the virus repeatedly springing from animals to humans or, more seriously, spreading rapidly among humans after an initial animal jump? “These two cases cannot be separated by DNA”. Only the reservoir animal can get epidemiological data or DNA. Figuring this out will presently be the main epidemiological target for everyone.

I think we're looking at a pandemic if it's not implemented early, "Bedford told STAT News on Jan. 27— though he warned it was impossible to say how serious a Covid-19 pandemic would be. Such work by Bedford and other virus trackers is possible due to the rapid genetic sequencing of infected people— unfeasible or even unlikely not too many years ago— and a collective effort to openly share such genetic data with the research community around the world.

Basically, a week after reporting that there is this new thing; China's outstanding scientists have a genome for the novel virus that had never before been seen. That first genome was great for people developing quick testing to actually be able to validate cases and these subsequent genomes are very useful in understanding simple epidemiological issues. "Adding a few main samples will change the story dramatically, due to the rapidly evolving nature of the disease.

With access to additional genetic sequences from more infected people, teammates from Bedford and Nextstrain wrote on a post on their site on Jan. 30 that the low mutation rate of the disease is the result of spreading person-to-person from unknown animals to humans in November or early December 2019 since its initial jump. The team also wrote in their Jan. 30 report: While the virus has started to catch up mutations as it spreads among people— as this form of virus naturally does — such mutations do not appear to be related to changes in the actions of the virus. The new virus seems to be less likely to kill those with confirmed cases than its corona virus predecessor, SARS, but data are too scant for firm conclusions.

Bedford and colleagues explain their latest data on the Covid-19 spread and evolution around the world. The map shows the number and location of viral sequences they study as the virus spread out of China from cases around the world. Meanwhile, a new analysis of the first 425 people with the virus, reported by a research team based in China in the New England Journal of Medicine on January 29, found that it takes about five days for a person who is eventually diagnosed with the disease to develop symptoms following their initial infection with the virus.