Chinese coronavirus: should we be afraid of it? Six questions about a deadly disease

The three French positive cases of the new coronavirus, the first in Europe, are added this Friday evening to an assessment that continues to swell. In just over twenty-four hours, it has passed from 600 sick and 17 dead worldwide to nearly 1,300 infected people and 41 deaths, local authorities said on Saturday. On Thursday, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared an emergency in the Middle Kingdom.

And outside of China?

Before France, exported cases have been described in Japan, South Korea, Thailand but also in the United States. A first case has just been announced in Australia: the patient, a man on whom no other details have been disclosed, joined Melbourne a week ago from the city of Wuhan, epicenter of the epidemic, said the Australian authorities.

In the hope of stopping the spread of the so-called 2019-nCoV, China has extended its health cordon this Saturday, and it is now 56 million people who are confined to 18 communes – five more cities of the Hubei Province (center) have been added to the 13 initials. Consequently, public transport to these agglomerations is no longer provided, and the highway ramps serving them are closed.

The National Institute of Health (Inserm), which developed a map of the risk of importing the epidemic into Europe, had estimated the probability that the virus arrives in France within two weeks between 5% and 13% according to hypotheses. A reassuring scenario quickly contradicts.

Who are the victims ?

Jean-Claude Manuguerra, head of the emergency biological intervention unit at the Institut Pasteur, in Paris, was able to consult the list of profiles of the deceased. “These are elderly patients, suffering from comorbidities or younger but sick, immunocompromised. A virus, he says, “is like a slap. If you are in good health, you will remain standing otherwise it will knock you down ”.

What is this virus?

Still mysterious, we know that it belongs to the family of coronaviruses, known for more than forty years, at the origin of common colds. It is named after the envelope of the virus, which forms like a coat with a layer of hair.

But in 2003, one of them created the surprise: severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), also from China, was much more dangerous and led, for the first time, to severe pathologies, causing nearly 800 deaths. In 2012, a new coronavirus was detected for the first time in Saudi Arabia.

The one we have just discovered, responsible for cough, fever, chills, fatigue, respiratory discomfort, is therefore a parent of SARS. “He was isolated in just three weeks by the Chinese, hat!” “Welcomes Professor Eric Caumes, head of the infectious diseases department of the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris.

How is contamination done?

One thing is certain, the virus, which has an average incubation period of seven days, was transmitted to man by an animal which was, most certainly, on the seafood market, where one sells snakes, badgers, live rats, where the first case was recorded in Wuhan. Which ? “In my opinion, it is not a fish, but a mammal, leans the Institut Pasteur researcher, Jean-Claude Manuguerra. No track is excluded. “

For SARS, bat bats, carriers of the coronavirus, had infected civets, large cats, which themselves contaminated humans. “Guinea pig, rabbit or hamster?” For now, we don’t care, exclaims Eric Caumes. We have an epidemic to manage! “