Early detection and containment key for ending latest coronavirus outbreak

Friday, 24 January 2020

An outbreak specialist says New Zealand needs to be thinking hard about its toolkit to tackle the deadly coronavirus that has so far taken six lives.

OPINION: On my last visit to China I triggered an infrared camera sensor that detected I had a high body temperature.

'Do you have a fever?' Asked an official at the Hong Kong-Shenzhen border crossing. I didn't.

But I spent the next 15 minutes in a small room with two nurses who put thermometers in my ears and under my armpits just to make sure.

Thousands of Chinese travelling home late last week to welcome in the Year of the Rat will have experienced the same type of screening as the authorities try to contain 2019-nCoV, the coronavirus strain that has been traced to the Chinese city of Wuhan.

A Chinese passenger that just arrived on the last bullet train from Wuhan to Beijing is checked for a fever by a health worker at a Beijing railway station on January 23, 2020.

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Travellers wearing face mask wait at the departure hall of West Kowloon Station on January 23, 2020 in Hong Kong, China.

This is pretty serious. The virus isn't well understood, but we know it can be transmitted from human to human and 17 deaths have already been attributed to it. What is most feared is a repeat of SARS, the 2003 coronavirus outbreak that claimed 774 lives – a fatality rate of 9.7 per cent.

That virus also originated in China, which has seen several avian flu outbreaks over the years and which had to cull millions of pigs last year as African swine flu raged through herds.

Pandemics have emerged all over the world – Zika, Ebola and HIV/AIDS are among the best known. Ten years ago H1N1 swine flu was detected in Mexico. It's estimated that it may have claimed up to 579,000 lives globally.

But scientists see China as ground zero for the potential development of a virus that could prove even more lethal – akin to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that killed between 50 million and 100m people.

That's because hundreds of millions of Chinese live in close proximity to animals and buy their meat at live animal markets where poultry and pigs, dogs and fish are crammed together in unsanitary conditions. If a chicken is infected, it can pass the virus on to another animal that is then sold and trucked to another province, spreading disease, including to humans. In rural areas, people wash in polluted rivers alongside migrating ducks.

China is a pathogenic melting pot and the conditions making it so are not likely to change quickly.

So the priority is early detection, containment and understanding the latest virus. A vaccine could take two years to develop. China didn't do itself any favours by trying to cover up the SARS outbreak. 2019-nCoV will test its ability to open up and ask for help to shut his down.

It is in everyone's interests that it does so quickly.