We spoke with a virologist about coronavirus, and where the threat stands right now
Chinese travelers wearing protective masks on January 21 in Beijing. Photo: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images On Friday, the State Department issued a travel advisory warning Americans not to travel to China, and Delta and American Airlines suspended all flights from the U.S. to China. More than 200 deaths have been linked to the new coronavirus, while about 10,000 infections have been confirmed worldwide.
Dr. Angela Rasmussen is a virologist at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. She studies how hosts react and respond to infectious diseases like Ebola and MERS. Intelligencer talked to Rasmussen about face masks, the WHO’s decision to label 2019-nCoV an international public-health emergency, and the danger in circulating research based on just a handful of cases.
Oh, definitely. I’ll go on record as saying that I think it’s wonderful that data is coming out as rapidly as it is and certainly I think that the availability of preprint — papers that haven’t gone through peer review — has really helped as well. But I think that we need to be really cautious about making too many conclusions about this. We just need to be very cautious in interpreting the data that comes out and also scrutinize it closely.
What I think is more important, and this is what we’re finding out right now, is the incidence of severe disease. Many coronaviruses are out there, probably more than we know about, cause mild, cold-like illness. Many are not known to infect humans at all. What really determines how big of a public-health crisis this is going to be, in the absence of fear and panic and all of the things that can come along with that, is how many people end up getting severe pneumonia.
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