February 26, 2020

expert reaction to recent developments involving COVID-19

More comments from experts on recent developments in the COVID-19 outbreak.

Prof Andrew Tatem, Professor within Geography and Environmental Science, University of Southampton, said:

“We’re living in a highly globalized and mobile world and seeing the consequences of this – back in the 1300s, it took around 15 years for bubonic plague to spread from China to Europe, in the 1918 influenza pandemic it took many months for global spread to occur, today we’re seeing global spread of COVID-19 in a matter of days and weeks. To counter-balance this we do now have an armory of tools that can help though, including rapid communications to alert health systems and prepare for outbreaks, advanced diagnostic tools made quickly available and stronger scientific knowledge on control methods. The apparent progress seen in China in now controlling the virus based on using some of these new tools, together with traditional approaches of quarantine and contact-tracing, is something that the rest of the world can quickly learn from and implement to control and slow the spread that we’re now seeing in the rest of the world. More cases in more countries over the coming days seem to be inevitable based on what’s happening in Iran, Italy and South Korea, but we’re also learning as a global community more and more every day about the virus and how to tackle it.”

Prof Devi Sridhar, Chair of Global Public Health, Edinburgh Medical School, said:

“Developments in Italy, Iran, South Korea as well as the sobering information shared by from the WHO Mission Chief to China all indicate that COVID-19 must be taken extremely seriously. As Dr Tedros noted in his briefing to the African Union, while COVID-19 is a mild disease in 80% of individuals, the other 20% have severe/critical disease, ranging from shortness of breath to septic shock & multi-organ failure. These require intensive care, using equipment such as respiratory support machines. This is most worrying for low resource countries which already struggle to provide basic primary healthcare. Beyond the direct impact of coronavirus on individuals, this would also be incredibly disruptive to the general health system and have knock-on effects on maternal health, child vaccination campaigns, and the everyday diseases that people require health services for.

“We also don’t have good answers to basic questions such as when did the virus spillover from animals to humans, from what species of animal, how many people have been exposed to the virus, what is the case fatality rate, and what is the R0 (how contagious is the virus). The pressure is now on for rapid diagnostics, serology tests, therapeutics (with remdesivir identified as one of the most promising antivirals) as well as a vaccine. “

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:

http://www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

The SMC also produced a Factsheet on COVID-19 which is available here:

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/smc-novel-coronavirus-factsheet/

Declared interests

None received.