Wuhan - home to around 11 million people - is now rapidly building a new 1,000-bed hospital to deal with the increasing number of victims. The project will "solve the shortage of existing medical resources" and would be "built fast [and] not cost much... because it will be prefabricated buildings". Videos have been circulating on social media, reportedly taken by Wuhan residents, showing long queues at local hospitals.
Earlier, information from China's National Health Commission, when the death toll was 17, said the youngest person who died from the virus was 48 and the oldest was 89.
Most victims were elderly and suffered from other chronic diseases including Parkinson's and diabetes.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51230011We now know this is not a virus that will burn out on its own and disappear. Only the decisions being made in China - including shutting down cities - can stop it spreading. Scientists have revealed each infected person is passing the virus onto between 1.4 and 2.5 people. It is known as the virus's basic reproduction number - anything higher than 1.0 means it's self-sustaining.
Those figures are early estimates, but put coronavirus in roughly the same league as Sars. There are two crucial outstanding questions - who is infectious and when are they infectious. The fact only 25% of reported cases are severe is a mixed blessing.
Yes, that is less dangerous than Sars, but if those hard-to-detect mild or maybe symptomless cases are contagious too, then it is much harder to contain. And we still don't know when people are contagious. Is it before symptoms appear, or only after severe symptoms emerge? One is significantly harder to stop spreading than the other.
“To address the insufficiency of existing medical resources,” Wuhan is constructing a hospital modeled after the Xiaotangshan SARS hospital in Beijing, Wuhan authorities said in a Friday notice. The facility will be a prefabricated structure on a 270,000-square-foot lot, slated for completion Feb. 3.
The SARS hospital was built from scratch in 2003 in just six days to treat an outbreak of a similar respiratory virus that had spread from China to more than a dozen countries and killed about 800 people. The hospital featured individual isolation units that looked like rows of tiny cabins.
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/st ... s-hospitalChinese officials have not said how long the shutdowns of the cities will last. While sweeping measures are typical of China’s Communist Party-led government, large-scale quarantines are rare around the world, even in deadly epidemics, because of concerns about infringing on people’s liberties.
Recalling the government’s initial coverup of SARS, many Chinese are suspicious of the case numbers reported by officials. Authorities in turn have been keen to pledge transparency. China’s cabinet, the State Council, announced Friday that it will be collecting information on government departments that have failed in their response to the new outbreak, including “delays, concealment and underreporting of the epidemic.”
It is now thought that kraits and cobras sold at the seafood market in Wuhan were the source of the virus. Kraits and cobras hunt bats among other food sources.
Snakes -- the Chinese krait and the Chinese cobra -- may be the original source of the newly discovered coronavirus that has triggered an outbreak of a deadly infectious respiratory illness in China this winter.The many-banded krait (Bungarus multicinctus), also known as the Taiwanese krait or the Chinese krait, is a highly venomous species of elapid snake found in much of central and southern China and Southeast Asia.
In the case of this 2019 coronavirus outbreak, reports state that most of the first group of patients hospitalized were workers or customers at a local seafood wholesale market which also sold processed meats and live consumable animals including poultry, donkeys, sheep, pigs, camels, foxes, badgers, bamboo rats, hedgehogs and reptiles. However, since no one has ever reported finding a coronavirus infecting aquatic animals, it is plausible that the coronavirus may have originated from other animals sold in that market.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/22/health/s ... index.htmlThe study of the genetic code of 2019-nCoV reveals that the new virus is most closely related to two bat SARS-like coronavirus samples from China, initially suggesting that, like SARS and MERS, the bat might also be the origin of 2019-nCoV. The authors further found that the viral RNA coding sequence of 2019-nCoV spike protein, which forms the "crown" of the virus particle that recognizes the receptor on a host cell, indicates that the bat virus might have mutated before infecting people. But when the researchers performed a more detailed bioinformatics analysis of the sequence of 2019-nCoV, it suggests that this coronavirus might come from snakes.
The seafood market in Wuhan thought to be the source of the virus was closed and fully sanitized, so it may be difficult to find the exact source. At first it was thought that civets were the source of SARS, but it wasn't until 2017 that bats were found to be the source animal.