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Tracking Wuhan virus a ‘jigsaw puzzle’ as China cracks down with quarantine powers
- Prevention and control in hospitals is key to controlling outbreak, disease specialist says
- Hospitals nationwide authorised to quarantine any suspected carriers of the virus and their close contacts
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Tracking down the source and the infection route of the newly emerged coronavirus in the central Chinese city of Wuhan is akin to putting a jigsaw puzzle together, as the death toll rises and carriers of the pathogen emerge across the country and the world, according to a disease specialist.
“It’s early days, it’s a real jigsaw puzzle right now,” said David Heymann, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
“Right now, it doesn’t look like this is a particularly lethal virus. It’s lethal in people who have co-morbidities, elderly people who have diabetes and chronic lung disease, and that’s very similar to what the influenza virus does,” said Heymann, who is a former executive director of the World Health Organisation’s Communicable Diseases Cluster, where he headed the global response to the Sars virus in 2002-03.
“What’s key to all of this is good infection prevention and control in hospital settings. If health workers continue to get infected now that they know this virus is present, they can inadvertently infect other patients,” he said.
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