The virus that has infected hundreds in China shows signs of being far worse than SARS, the pandemic that killed nearly 800 people 17 years ago, a prominent virologist has warned after travelling to Wuhan, where the new coronavirus first began to spread.
Yi Guan, who played an important role in tracing the development of SARS, spoke hours before authorities prepared to place a second Chinese city on lockdown, as local officials employ increasingly harsh measures in hopes of controlling the spread of the deadly Wuhan virus. Beginning at midnight Thursday, all public transport will halt in Huanggang and checks mandated for every person entering or exiting the city of 7.5 million, situated 70 kilometres east of Wuhan. All theatres, cafes and entertainment venues will be closed as well. Authorities said they would also close rail stations in nearby Ezhou, a city of one million.
“Conservative estimates suggest that the scale of infection may eventually be 10 times higher than SARS,” said Dr. Guan, director of the State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Hong Kong, told China’s Caixin media group on Thursday. Dr. Guan spent two days in Wuhan this week.
China locks down the central city to try to contain the virus which has killed at least 17 and infected nearly 600.Reuters
The World Health Organization said it would deliberate again on Thursday whether it should declare a global emergency around the 2019-nCoV virus, which causes pneumonia-like symptoms and is believed to have originated at a market that sold wild game.
Ivan Hung, chief of the infectious diseases division at the University of Hong Kong, said the ability to rapidly identify the virus in patients should help authorities to counteract its spread. And, he said, “so far the virus is behaving in a less lethal manner than the SARS.”
Dr. Guan, however, left Wuhan convinced that “the epidemic situation was out of control.”
Most viral outbreaks ”are controllable,” he said. He pointed to SARS, H5N1 and swine fever.
“I’ve experienced so much and I’ve never felt scared before,” he said. “But this time I’m scared.”
By Thursday evening, Chinese authorities had identified 634 confirmed cases, 422 suspected cases and 17 deaths in 30 provinces and regions, including Hong Kong and Macau. Singapore on Thursday confirmed its first case: a 66-year old man from Wuhan. Further cases have been confirmed in Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, Japan and the U.S.
The comments from Dr. Guan mark the strongest warning to emerge from a professional who has travelled to Wuhan, a city of 11 million that on Thursday entered a partial lockdown. At 10 a.m., authorities shut down the city’s public transit and barred the boarding of outbound trains and planes.
Local officials described taking “war-time measures,” state media reported. That included the return of China’s familiar heavy-handed control of information: Censors quickly deleted a post from the Wuhan Health Commission admitting to “long queues and a shortage of beds in fever clinics.” The commission has been an important source of local updates. Numerous people in Wuhan took to social media to say they were unable to get medical treatment — or refused diagnostic tests, calling into question the thoroughness of official statistics, even as the scale of the lockdown pointed to significant concern.
But the draconian measures being undertaken may be too late, Dr. Guan said, pointing to the great numbers of people who had already left Wuhan to return to childhood homes across China before the lockdown was imposed.
“When these people returned to their hometowns, they took the virus to all parts of the country,” he said. In Wuhan, doctors told Caixin that the number of people infected could reach as high as 6,000. Using computer modelling, researchers at Imperial College London now estimate as many as 4,000 cases could exist in Wuhan alone.
Given the incubation period of the virus, Dr. Guan estimated that pneumonia-like symptoms may begin to appear more broadly across China beginning Jan. 25. It called into question whether the nation-wide public rush to wear masks — few faces remained uncovered at airports and train stations across the country Thursday — had also come too late.
Other experts disagreed. “We have got the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus and the ability to perform rapid diagnosis,” said Dr. Hung, at the University of Hong Kong. “During SARS, we were playing catchup and had no knowledge of the SARS coronavirus until very late stage — likely five to six months after the outbreak.”
At the Beijing West Train Station, a porter on Thursday told passersby that bullet trains passing through Wuhan were being disinfected several times a day. Chinese social media called attention to accounts this week from people encountering frontline workers at state-owned firms who had been told not to wear masks, lest it add to the sense of seriousness. By Thursday, those staff were wearing masks.
Foreign experts have said early indications suggest the virus is not as deadly as early coronavirus pandemics, such as SARS and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). The Wuhan virus has so far proven deadly only for older people. Among those who have died to date, the youngest is 48 years old.
The major organs of Chinese state media, however, gave little coverage to the spread of the virus, devoting greater attention to smiling pictures of president Xi Jinping issuing greetings for the Lunar New Year.
It stood in stark contrast to the uncertainty and fear that coursed through Wuhan, where people raced to leave the city early Thursday morning, worried that authorities had declared an open-ended moratorium on trips out of the city. The lockdown appears to have also extended to highways in and out of Wuhan, with state media reporting closures.
“The biggest concern to me is how long this sealing-off will last,” said Li Mei, who operates a popular shop selling flat cakes in Wuhan. “We only know it started at 10 a.m. today, and the buses have stopped.”
At the city’s Wanfangtang Drug Store, a shopkeeper who gave her name only as Ms. Liu described six days of working 8 am to midnight, in an attempt to serve a never-ending queue of customers buying masks, alcohol disinfectant and anti-viral medication.
She was so tired, “I almost passed out,” she said. The shop had run out of many products, and “even more people rushed to our store since the lockdown was announced this morning.”
“It’s obvious,” she added, “that people are feeling a greater and greater sense of panic. But it remains under control — at least they are lining up to make purchases.”
Her store, she said, “is probably the busiest place on the street,” as public spaces in Wuhan emptied of people.
“You can barely see anyone wandering outside,” said Duan Jie, a manager at the Wuhan branch of an LED lighting company. Many aspects of life remained normal: “We can still go out to shop, and go to the supermarket to buy fruit and vegetables to prepare for the blackout period,” he said. But he worried about the sufficiency of the city’s food supplies if the lockdown remains in place for long.
Car owners like him have more options, since only public transit has been halted.
Dr. Guan, however, warned that too little was being done in Wuhan, telling Caixin that too few places were being disinfected. Based on what he saw on Tuesday and Wednesday, “local health protection has not been upgraded at all.”
Mr. Duan had nonetheless cancelled plans to drive with his wife and daughter to his hometown for Lunar New Year celebrations, known in China as Spring Festival. They planned to stay home instead.
But he and others barely grumbled.
Spring Festival without extended family might be lonely.
But “I care more about the situation with this disease, and how to make sure my families all safely get through it,” Mr. Duan said.
“Not leaving Wuhan won’t kill you. But the virus could.”
The Canadian government says it will donate up to 200,000 vaccine doses to fight the mpox outbreak in Congo and other African countries.
It says the donated doses of Imvamune will come from Canada’s existing supply and will not affect the country’s preparedness for mpox cases in this country.
Minister of Health Mark Holland says the donation “will help to protect those in the most affected regions of Africa and will help prevent further spread of the virus.”
Dr. Madhukar Pai, Canada research chair in epidemiology and global health, says although the donation is welcome, it is a very small portion of the estimated 10 million vaccine doses needed to control the outbreak.
Vaccine donations from wealthier countries have only recently started arriving in Africa, almost a month after the World Health Organization declared the mpox outbreak a public health emergency of international concern.
A few days after the declaration in August, Global Affairs Canada announced a contribution of $1 million for mpox surveillance, diagnostic tools, research and community awareness in Africa.
On Thursday, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said mpox is still on the rise and that testing rates are “insufficient” across the continent.
Jason Kindrachuk, Canada research chair in emerging viruses at the University of Manitoba, said donating vaccines, in addition to supporting surveillance and diagnostic tests, is “massively important.”
But Kindrachuk, who has worked on the ground in Congo during the epidemic, also said that the international response to the mpox outbreak is “better late than never (but) better never late.”
“It would have been fantastic for us globally to not be in this position by having provided doses a much, much longer time prior than when we are,” he said, noting that the outbreak of clade I mpox in Congo started in early 2023.
Clade II mpox, endemic in regions of West Africa, came to the world’s attention even earlier — in 2022 — as that strain of virus spread to other countries, including Canada.
Two doses are recommended for mpox vaccination, so the donation may only benefit 100,000 people, Pai said.
Pai questioned whether Canada is contributing enough, as the federal government hasn’t said what percentage of its mpox vaccine stockpile it is donating.
“Small donations are simply not going to help end this crisis. We need to show greater solidarity and support,” he said in an email.
“That is the biggest lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic — our collective safety is tied with that of other nations.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 13, 2024.
Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.
HALIFAX – The Nova Scotia government says it could be months before it reveals how many people are on the wait-list for a family doctor.
The head of the province’s health authority told reporters Wednesday that the government won’t release updated data until the 160,000 people who were on the wait-list in June are contacted to verify whether they still need primary care.
Karen Oldfield said Nova Scotia Health is working on validating the primary care wait-list data before posting new numbers, and that work may take a matter of months. The most recent public wait-list figures are from June 1, when 160,234 people, or about 16 per cent of the population, were on it.
“It’s going to take time to make 160,000 calls,” Oldfield said. “We are not talking weeks, we are talking months.”
The interim CEO and president of Nova Scotia Health said people on the list are being asked where they live, whether they still need a family doctor, and to give an update on their health.
A spokesperson with the province’s Health Department says the government and its health authority are “working hard” to turn the wait-list registry into a useful tool, adding that the data will be shared once it is validated.
Nova Scotia’s NDP are calling on Premier Tim Houston to immediately release statistics on how many people are looking for a family doctor. On Tuesday, the NDP introduced a bill that would require the health minister to make the number public every month.
“It is unacceptable for the list to be more than three months out of date,” NDP Leader Claudia Chender said Tuesday.
Chender said releasing this data regularly is vital so Nova Scotians can track the government’s progress on its main 2021 campaign promise: fixing health care.
The number of people in need of a family doctor has more than doubled between the 2021 summer election campaign and June 2024. Since September 2021 about 300 doctors have been added to the provincial health system, the Health Department said.
“We’ll know if Tim Houston is keeping his 2021 election promise to fix health care when Nova Scotians are attached to primary care,” Chender said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2024.
ST. JOHN’S, N.L. – Newfoundland and Labrador‘s chief medical officer is monitoring the rise of whooping cough infections across the province as cases of the highly contagious disease continue to grow across Canada.
Dr. Janice Fitzgerald says that so far this year, the province has recorded 230 confirmed cases of the vaccine-preventable respiratory tract infection, also known as pertussis.
Late last month, Quebec reported more than 11,000 cases during the same time period, while Ontario counted 470 cases, well above the five-year average of 98. In Quebec, the majority of patients are between the ages of 10 and 14.
Meanwhile, New Brunswick has declared a whooping cough outbreak across the province. A total of 141 cases were reported by last month, exceeding the five-year average of 34.
The disease can lead to severe complications among vulnerable populations including infants, who are at the highest risk of suffering from complications like pneumonia and seizures. Symptoms may start with a runny nose, mild fever and cough, then progress to severe coughing accompanied by a distinctive “whooping” sound during inhalation.
“The public, especially pregnant people and those in close contact with infants, are encouraged to be aware of symptoms related to pertussis and to ensure vaccinations are up to date,” Newfoundland and Labrador’s Health Department said in a statement.
Whooping cough can be treated with antibiotics, but vaccination is the most effective way to control the spread of the disease. As a result, the province has expanded immunization efforts this school year. While booster doses are already offered in Grade 9, the vaccine is now being offered to Grade 8 students as well.
Public health officials say whooping cough is a cyclical disease that increases every two to five or six years.
Meanwhile, New Brunswick’s acting chief medical officer of health expects the current case count to get worse before tapering off.
A rise in whooping cough cases has also been reported in the United States and elsewhere. The Pan American Health Organization issued an alert in July encouraging countries to ramp up their surveillance and vaccination coverage.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 10, 2024.
