Saturday February 8, 2020
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Near the Mont Blanc, five Britons are infected with the corona virus, including one child. Meanwhile, scientists from all over the world are researching both a vaccine and the spread of the disease – and may have identified another way of transmission for the virus.
In France, according to the government, five British ski vacationers have been diagnosed with corona infection. Minister of Health Agnes Buzyn said that the sufferers had stayed in the same accommodation near Mont Blanc as another Briton who had traveled from Singapore and who had recently been diagnosed with the infection.
The minister explained that there was also a child among those newly infected in the French ski resort of Les Contamines-Montjoie. The group was admitted to a regional hospital in good health. There are now eleven Corona cases in France. According to the authorities, the number of confirmed illnesses outside of mainland China is more than 330. According to the Federal Ministry of Health, the number is currently 14 in Germany. The People’s Republic reports the current number of cases as 31,774. However, the authorities calculate 2050 cases in which the patients have recovered or died.
At the center of the epidemic, in central China’s Wuhan, a 60-year-old American died of a corona infection, according to the US embassy in Beijing. After hundreds of deaths from the Chinese virus, the US citizen is the first confirmed victim of a different nationality. In addition, it is believed that a Japanese person in the Chinese metropolis succumbed to the disease. According to the Tokyo Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the man between the ages of 60 and 70 was suspected of having a corona infection, citing Chinese authorities. Because of difficulties in diagnosis, pneumonia was given as the cause of death.
The total number of deaths rose to 722. There have been two deaths due to corona disease outside mainland China. Those who died in the Hong Kong SAR and the Philippines were Chinese nationals. With the 722 corona deaths reported by the authorities by Saturday, the number of deaths could shortly exceed the officially registered 774 deaths in the 2002/2003 Sars pandemic. At that time, a little over 8000 people contracted Sars – around a quarter of the current Corona patients. Sars was also a corona pathogen that had been transmitted from animals to humans in China.
Government plans to fly out more Germans
Meanwhile, the federal government plans to bring additional citizens from the Wuhan region. The German Senate Department for Health announced that 20 Germans should arrive in Berlin on Sunday. Upon arrival, they would be isolated for 14 days. “Berlin is well prepared. All processes are in place,” health senator Dilek Kalayci explains. All would be tested for the corona virus. A result is expected on Monday afternoon.
Scientists around the world are currently researching both a vaccine against the novel virus and the ways in which the disease spreads. Because some patients in a Wuhan hospital first had diarrhea and nausea before the onset of fever symptoms and breathing difficulties, Chinese scientists suspect that the novel coronavirus may also be fecal. The main mode of transmission of the virus is still a droplet infection from a patient’s cough, according to a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
In ten percent of 138 patients, the course of the disease began with diarrhea and nausea, the scientists write. The researchers said that in the early cases of the disease, which first appeared in Wuhan in December, the focus was primarily on airway symptoms. Symptoms associated with the digestive tract may have been overlooked.
The discovery of a pathway of infection via faeces comes as no surprise to the scientists, since the Sars virus also spread in part during the epidemic in the early 2000s. Sars, like the new disease, is triggered by coronaviruses. Contagion through feces could pose a new challenge to contain viral disease, especially in hospitals, warned David Fisman, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto.
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