Chinese scientists have identified a new transmission route for the coronavirus: diarrhea, which would be a secondary route. The primary route of contamination would be through virus-laden droplets from an infected person’s cough.
The researchers who worked on the early cases focused on patients with respiratory symptoms, and conceded that they may have overlooked those related to the digestive system.
According to the latest article by Chinese scientists, which appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), 14 out of 138 patients (10%) from a hospital in Wuhan initially had diarrhea and nausea, one or two days before the development of fever and respiratory problems.
The first American patient diagnosed with 2019-nCoV also had watery stools for two days and the virus was then detected in his stool. Similar cases in China have been documented in the review The Lancet, but are uncommon.
The faecal route, an amplification of the epidemic?
This possibility is not really a surprise for scientists, since the new virus belongs to the same family as SARS. In 2003, faecal transmission of SARS infected hundreds of people in a Hong Kong residential complex.
The faecal tract may present new challenges for containing the virus, but may be more a problem in hospitals, which can become “amplifiers” of epidemics, according to David Fisman, epidemiologist at the University of Toronto.
