31 January
Early identification, reporting, isolation, diagnosis and treatment is the best and most effective way to contain the pneumonia caused by the novel coronavirus . . . .
Wu Hao ( head of the Fangzhuang community health service center in Beijing )
THE general public should reach a consensus that early identification, reporting, isolation, diagnosis and treatment is the best and most effective way to contain the pneumonia caused by the novel coronavirus, a health official said in Beijing on Wednesday.
With intensive media coverage of the situation, the public has been aware of the urgency of curbing the outbreak, but efforts are still needed to mobilize the whole society to conduct health management in communities, Wu Hao, head of the Fangzhuang community health service center in Beijing, said at a press conference held by the National Health Commission.
"Such comprehensive prevention and control measures are the best and most effective way to prevent the virus from further spreading and ultimately contain the outbreak," Wu said.
The official also introduced practices of joint prevention work, saying local governments have promoted multiple measures to help residents recognize that the temporary inconvenience to their daily lives is for the good of them and their families and cooperating is their social responsibility.
Information technologies have been used in community-level health consulting, monitoring, and epidemic prevention, and online psychological consultants are also available to help ease anxiety amid the virus outbreak, according to Wu.
In many neighborhoods in Beijing, family doctors have teamed up with neighborhood committees to better manage the health of residents, and family doctors have launched effective checks of suspected patients to avoid unnecessary visits to hospitals, said Wu.
In Fengtai district, a family doctor mobile application is providing health information and sending messages to residents' mobile phones.
All these measures have helped residents recognize that isolation and medical observation at home are necessary parts of epidemic prevention and control, Wu said.
Spread to all of the country's 31 provincial-level regions
China's Tibet Autonomous Region has confirmed its first case of a patient with a new pneumonia-causing coronavirus, health authorities said Thursday, meaning the infection has spread to all of the country's 31 provincial-level regions.
The death toll across China from the new virus has increased to 170, including nearly 130 in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, while at least 7,800 cases of infection have been identified, official media reported.
Against the backdrop of the continuing rise in confirmed cases, the Chinese Football Association said Thursday it will postpone the Feb. 22 start of the domestic league's season to protect the health of fans, players and coaches.
The coronavirus, known to be transmitted between humans, has already spread to other Asian nations such as Japan and South Korea, as well as North America, Europe, Australia and the Middle East.
In the past two days through Thursday, Finland, the Philippines and India reported their first confirmed cases of the mysterious and deadly coronavirus, as the number of infected pneumonia patients in China has, in recent days, climbed by more than one thousand each day.
The Chinese government has been struggling to prevent the expansion of the virus, saying supplies of personal protection equipment for medical experts have become tight.
All eyes are on whether the World Health Organization will declare a public health emergency of international concern over the current situation at an urgent meeting convened on Thursday.
The new virus is believed to have begun spreading late last year in Wuhan, around 1,000 kilometers south of Beijing. The city is a major business and transit hub with a population of some 11 million.
Zhong Nanshan, head of a high-level expert team in China's government-run National Health Commission, was quoted Wednesday by the state-run Xinhua News Agency as saying the new coronavirus originated in bats.
The Chinese pulmonologist, who combated the 2002-2003 SARS epidemic, said the new coronavirus has the same origin as a virus found in a type of bat in 2017, the news agency reported.
In Hubei Province, whose capital city is Wuhan, the number of deaths stemming from the new virus has risen to 162 as of Thursday morning, up 37 from the previous day.
But some types lead to more serious, sometimes deadly respiratory diseases such as severe acute respiratory syndrome or Middle East respiratory syndrome, known as SARS and MERS, respectively.
The SARS pandemic sickened 8,098 people and killed 774 globally.
Incubation period at around 5 days
The period between exposure to the new coronavirus that originated in China and symptoms is 5.2 days on average, but varies greatly among patients, according to one of the largest studies yet published on the deadly epidemic.
While admitting that the estimate is "imprecise," the Chinese team behind a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on Wednesday said their findings support a 14- day medical observation period for people exposed to the pathogen.
The World Health Organization said in an update Monday that the incubation period ranged from between two and 10 days before symptoms like fever, cough, shortness of breath and acute respiratory distress emerged.
The incubation period estimate in the new study was based on 10 patients.
The researchers also studied the virus's first 425 patients in order to establish two other fundamental characteristics of the outbreak.
Since it first emerged in Wuhan in December, the number of cases of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus doubled every 7.4 days, the researchers wrote.
They also estimated that each infected person then infected an average of 2.2 other people, a figure known as the basic reproductive number, or R0 (pronounced "R-naught").
The figure doesn't predict how big an epidemic will eventually be, but is a useful measure nonetheless. In this case, it is relatively low: close to the seasonal flu (around 1.3), much less than the measles (12 or higher) and comparable to the SARS-epidemic of 2002-2003 (3).
The team also found that human-to-human transmission had been occurring among close contacts since the middle of December 2019.
The Chinese findings echo research by a team in the Netherlands that found an incubation period of 5.8 days, with large variations.
REFERENCES:
Xinhua; Kyodo; AFP News Updates
PHOTO: XINHUA
