The most dangerous virus to strike the planet in a century: One cough, one sneeze – is enough to spread the virus

“In this infection, we see very high levels of virus in the upper airway, in the nose and throat,” says Marion Koopmans, head of the department of virus science at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands, who is involved with that nation’s public health response to the outbreak. Those high levels of the virus mean that the coronavirus can infect others “the moment you start to sneeze, you start to cough,” she says. This emerging picture of the disease may help to explain why the coronavirus appears to be spreading so rapidly. Research from China shows it can take five or even 10 days for the first symptoms to emerge. Those in the very early stages of the disease continue to move through public places, unaware of the potential risk they pose. Even when symptoms start, they can be vague, similar to the cold and flu. Other studies from China show that some may never experience symptoms at all. “That makes the policy of case finding and containment very challenging,” Koopmans says.

Koopmans says that the revelation came for her while trying to conduct disease surveillance in the Netherlands. Like many countries, the Netherlands initially screened patients with a history of foreign travel. But when a handful of untraceable cases appeared within the country, her team shifted strategies and began to test health care workers in the hospitals where the cases were reported. They found that many were mildly ill — and already highly infectious. “People can have really mild complaints, just a cough, just a sore throat, and already have a lot of virus [in their system],” she says. Alfredo Garzino-Demo, a virologist based at the University of Maryland and affiliated with the University of Padua in Italy, says this characteristic, while not uncommon among viruses, makes this disease extremely hard to contain. “Many diseases have a window period in which you don’t have symptoms but you are still able to transmit,” he says. “But this one is particularly serious.”

The evolving view helps explain why countries are having to resort to such extreme social distancing measures to contain the spread of the disease. It also highlights the need for broad testing of the general population, says Marie-Paule Kieny, director of research at Inserm, a French organization dedicated to the study of public health. Without broad testing, “we can’t look at the community and say what percentage of the people have had contact with the virus,” she says. That information is crucial in determining how best to deploy economically crippling social distancing measures. –NPR

Traces of the coronavirus found in a hospital air duct has led scientists to believe the disease could be spread through air-conditioning units, making it more contagious than initially thought. Swab analysis of rooms used by three coronavirus patients by experts at the National Centre for Infectious Diseases in Singapore suggest that the respiratory illness spreads easier than previously thought. An air duct connected to the room of one of the patients, thought to be only suffering from ‘mild’ symptoms,’ was found with traces of the virus, suggesting ‘suggests small, virus-laden droplets may be displaced by airflows and deposited on equipment such as vents.’

The research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, comes shortly after it was reported that 142 Britons were reported trapped on a Princess Cruise ship anchored for patients to undergo testing, off the coast of California yesterday.  –Daily Mail

70,00 Americans infected in the next 10 days: As many as 70,000 Americans could be confirmed as infected with coronavirus by the end of next week, marking a “pretty dramatic” increase in the number of confirmed cases, the director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, told his employees in an agency-wide conference call on Friday. But, Collins cautioned, “that doesn’t mean necessarily that the outbreak has exploded at an even more rapid rate.”

“It just means we’re now able to find out who’s out there, who is infected,” because “testing is now going to be much more available across the country,” he said. As director of NIH, Collins oversees the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whose own director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has become a trusted authority during the coronavirus crisis. According to Collins, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases inside the United States currently stands at about 14,000, and, “We will probably see four, five times that number of cases a week or 10 days from now. When will we be out the other side of this?” Collins asked rhetorically on the Friday call. “I have no crystal ball. … Will we be back [to normal] by July or August or September? I have no idea.” Collins made clear that “social distancing” is vital to stemming the spread of the deadly disease, even as he derided the popular phrase.  –ABC News