The numbers of the Coronavirus epidemic continue to increase and there are numerous questions on how to prevent the virus, what are the symptoms and the transmission process. The new Coronavirus would be a variant of Sars and Mers but less aggressive and with an incubation period of 14 days.
To make a comparison between viruses, Sars, severe acute respiratory syndrome, spread between 2002 and 2003 causing 813 deaths and 8,400 cases. Mers, on the other hand, Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome, from 2012 to 2019 affected 2500 people leading to 858 deaths.
The new Coronavirus would have been transmitted initially from animal to man and then from man to man. It is transmitted through saliva so the risk of contagion is amplified in confined spaces. Peking University has identified snakes as the vehicle of transmission, but many researchers around the world are skeptical of this hypothesis
The symptoms of the new virus are high fever, fatigue, dry cough and breathing difficulties
There are many Chinese cities in quarantine with tens of millions of people in isolation. Blocked metropolises are all around Wuhan, the hotbed city where the first case was discovered
The live animal market was to convey the virus to humans. A first thesis claims that the virus from bats would have recombined with another snake virus and from reptiles it would have passed to humans, but numerous scientists do not agree with this hypothesis
In any case, the main contagion risk factor is the movement of people with Coronavirus. For this reason, patients are isolated
And the airports are checking all the people arriving from China, especially from Wuhan
China has blocked all flights and trains in the cities affected by the epidemic and banned tourist agencies from selling tours abroad to the Chinese population
A new hospital is being built in Wuhan to deal with the emergency
Nature researchers have raised doubts about human snake transmission. Doubts arise from the fact that the host animal was identified without further field and laboratory investigations
It is also unlikely that the new coronavirus has had enough time to infect another host animal to alter its genome so significantly
Maria Lucia Mandola, of the Zooprophylactic Institute of Piedmont, maintains that “for coronaviruses there can be many reservoir animals even if it is more likely that in this case they are small mammals, which have greater possibility of contact with humans”
Even Mandola, like Nature’s researchers, explains that “to have the confirmation of snakes, Chinese researchers should have carried out laboratory and experimental tests directly on animals to see how the disease evolves, and it is not known if they did it”
