It seems like the pneumonitis epidemic in Wuhan is coming to an end, but there are still a lot of unanswered issues concerning the transmission methods and the severity of the disease.

- SARS-like virus in China
Is this nightmare going to keep coming back? After a new strain of pneumonia appeared in Wuhan, a megacity in central China, many people in the first ten days of this year wondered what it was. The illness, known as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), first appeared in China in 2002 and spread to thirty seven other countries, affecting 8098 people before it was finally contained in the summer of 2003. These Wuhan pneumonia cases believed to have been caused by a novel member of the coronavirus family that is closely related to the SARS virus. Both viruses were connected to a market selling a wide variety of live animals. Again, China seemed cagey about providing details.
The world’s leading health specialists may finally relax today. A sixty one-year-old man with a history of abdominal malignancies and chronic liver illness was the sole known fatality out of forty two (42) infected patients when Science went to print. Death rates from SARS averaged 9.2 per cent. There is no indication that the virus is readily transmitted between people, which may lead to a worldwide pandemic. The genomic sequence of the virus, which has not yet been given a name, has also been released by Chinese researchers.
Chinese sequencing data release, virologist Christian Drosten and colleagues at Berlin’s Charite Hospital have created a diagnostic test for the new virus, ehich they want to submit to the World Health Organization for publication. In the case of the new coronavirus, it recognizes snipped segments of three genes that are also found in the SARS virus. “We intended to utilize SARS as a foundation since every healthcare laboratory possesses SARS RNA as a good control, so they can get going right away,” Drosten adds, adding that SARS has not been identified in people in fifteen years. To study the virus in animals and aid the purpose of studying the virus in animals and aiding in the development of an easy-to-use antibody test, coronavirus researcher Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill is already attempting to create a live virus from the data.
Many questions remain unanswered. Investigators have not yet determined what kind of animal was sold in the market and tested positive for the virus. When it first appeared and the real number of persons afflicted is unknown. Meanwhile, a case reported on January Thirteen in Thailand-in a tourist fling from Wuhan to Bangkok – prompted World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to contact specialists on epidemic responses. According to the report that World Health Organization released on the January 14th, the patient had traveled to other animal shops but not the market in Wuhan which was the epicenter of the epidemic.
On December 8th, 2019, the first documented patient began experiencing symptoms. The fish market was shut down by authorities on New Year’s Day, and no new cases have been reported in Wuhan since 3rd January. Neither 763 close contacts of the afflicted nor healthcare personnel, who often get ill during outbreaks of human-to-human transmissible viruses, tested positive for the virus. According to Xu Jianguo, director of a communicable disease facility at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and chair of an assessment group advising the Chinese government, “It is a localized epidemic.” We may call it a week from now if no clients show up.
In a statement on 12th January, World Health Organization expressed its satisfaction with the “quality of the current investigations, the reaction mechanisms put in place in Wuhan, and the willingness to exchange information on a regular basis.”
The Wall Street Journal reported on the discovery of a new coronavirus on eighth January; Xu subsequently verified the result on a state-run television station. Jeremy Farrar, chairman of the London-based Wellcome Trust, tweeted his concern over claims that the Chinese government didn’t share “important public health data” because Chinese researchers desired to publish their results in high-profile journals first.
There is minimal variation across the six sequences, which evolutionary scientist Andrew Rambaut from the University of Edinburgh describes as “compatible with a single source.” This suggests that the infected animals at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which also offers bird, snake, and rabbit meat, all originated from the same batch. (Fishes have never had any coronaviruses detected in them.) But Farrar adds, “that makes me worried that whatever the exposure was to, it carried on for quite a long period,” since the instances emerged over the course of 1 month, indicating that the exposure was more than one group of animals at one area. Hong Kong University virologist Guan Yi believes that many “distinct and independent” transmissions from animals to humans created the Wuhan epidemic.
Viruses might have been picked up by whichever animal propagated them at the market from a more widespread source. The novel virus is most closely related to four bat viruses with surface proteins that may infect human cells. However, Rambaut warns that there may be a second natural host. Portions of its DNA are “very comparable to a bat virus,” he adds, while other parts are “not so much like a bat virus.”
Most of the known cases so far have been rather mild, as pointed out by Farrar; this suggests that the flu may have attacked many more individuals who did not seek medical attention before the pandemic was officially detected. Due to this, he argues that it is too soon to conclude that the disease does not transfer from person to person. “With a coronavirus, I’d be astonished if there wasn’t limited human-to-human transmission,” he says. To yet, instances have been verified by the detection of viral nucleic acid, which is undetectable until patients have fully recovered. Thanks to the virus’s isolation, scientists may now work on creating antibody tests that detect traces of previous infection.
Farrar and others fear that Lunar New Year travel might transmit the disease from Wuhan, a key transportation center, to neighboring cities. For Farrar, “this pandemic is not going to go away very soon” since “with humans, food and animals migrate.”