TORONTO – As the world reflects on the 10 year anniversary of SARS, doctors are focusing their efforts on a new virus that could have global implications.
Last year in Saudi Arabia, a new coronavirus cut from the same family as SARS, infected humans.
The fledgling NCoV virus shares similarities with SARS – or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, the global pandemic that ultimately claimed 900 lives worldwide with another 8,500 cases.
So far, 13 people who live in the Middle East or travelled to the region have been infected with the new coronavirus. Seven of them have died.
A decade after SARS, researchers have come a long way in monitoring disease, but managing NCoV could be the ultimate test.
“Essentially, the world’s got all their eyes trained on this particular virus,” according to Dr. Michael Gardam, director of infection prevention and control at University Health Network.
Surveillance networks help track disease
Surveillance networks pick up novel viruses that are burgeoning, and waves of communication pour in from city to city, handing officials any red flags to be on the lookout for.
“The question always is: is this a red herring, is this something that could be real?” Gardam told Global News.
Surveillance is how doctors were warned of the coronavirus. Still, right now it’s unclear if this new viral strain has the legs to spread violently.
- Bird flu risk to humans an ‘enormous concern,’ WHO says. Here’s what to know
- ‘She gets to be 10’: Ontario child’s heart donated to girl the same age
- Shoppers faces proposed class action over claims company is ‘abusive’ to pharmacists
- Most Canadian youth visit dentists, but lack of insurance a barrier
Predicting the potency of new coronavirus
“We don’t know whether this virus can be quite widespread and this is only the tip of the iceberg, which is kind of what we saw with H1N1 …,” Gardam warned.
Doctors are waiting with bated breath, pulling together what they’ve gathered on the virus and mapping its genome.
“What’s not SARS about it is that it’s not evolving and it’s not spreading like SARS at the moment. What it’s going to do is still obviously an open question,” according to Dr. Allison McGeer, director of infection control at Mount Sinai Hospital.
“The hard part is the stuff that we don’t know is coming. Imagine something on the scale of HIV infection but completely different. Right now, that is the challenge going forward,” she told Global News.
Coronaviruses are spread by large droplets of moisture, such as someone coughing or sneezing nearby or picking up droplets from surfaces like table tops.
Lab tests have suggested that the new virus is easily transmitted – it can infect the cells of airways of human lungs just like SARS and common colds. While the lab work offers insight, it doesn’t necessarily predict how virulent the disease will be in the real world.
Outside the body, they’re fragile, surviving for about 24 hours and destroyed easily by regular cleaning agents.
The unknown variable is the outcome of patients once they’ve been infected with the virus, according to Dr. Mary Vearncombe. She’s the medical director of infection prevention and control at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.
“So if you get infected with this virus, are you going to get a severe infection like these 13 described cases or is there a lot less severe illness that is quite widespread in that area?”
So far, it reportedly causes severe pneumonia and kidney failure.
Researchers are treading carefully with investigating the new coronavirus. And with good reason:
“It’s just the fact that wherever something is in the world, if it gets going there, it’ll be here within a matter of days because we’re just so interconnected,” Gardam told Global News.
Spreading to front line workers
For its part, the World Health Organization says there are likely a dozen more “probable” cases, in which people were exposed, became sick but haven’t been tested.
But unlike SARS, it hasn’t made its way to infecting front line health care staff, which signals that it may not be as efficient in spreading from person to person.
SARS has left its mark on physicians, though. They say they’ve learned lessons from handling the 2003 epidemic.
Even with vast surveillance in place, Gardam worries about the one-off cases that could trigger a firestorm of contagion.
“I still worry about that person who was diagnosed in London who had a family member that nobody’s found yet who got on a plane and is now sitting in my emergency department. Is our system going to detect them? Are they going to be isolated appropriately?”
Researchers are still trying to piece together what sparked the onset of this coronavirus.
Reports suggest it may have come from bats or goats. It isn’t uncommon for viruses to jump from animals to humans and transform in the process – as was the case with 2009’s H1N1 pandemic.
Comments