central Chinese cities it's caused by a novel coronavirus that
means it's brand-new so new that actually, it doesn't have a name yet it's from a
the family called the coronaviruses.
the symptoms of this illness are pretty mundane
on the face of it, it's adry cough fever and then breathing problems it seems
quite mild in lots of people and probably those people don't up in the hospital
at all, we only know about the more severe cases which are where people have gone
on to develop viral pneumonia and those people obviously end up in hospital and
all the deaths have been amongst those people this brand new coronavirus came
from animals and it's believed that the source was actually a seafood market in Wuhan
which also sells wild animals sofar as far as we know all the cases have come
out of Wuhan so some of these people are in places like Thailand and japan but
they haven't picked it up there they actually got it in Wuhan and then they
travelled in China where most cases are it's older people who are ending up in
hospital with this they're usually over 40 and the very youngest person diagnosed
is about 13 or 14 years old so it doesn't appear to be affecting small children
and those who have died ten actually to have underlying conditions as they say
they they'refrail they may have heart disease or cancer already and so they're
vulnerable basically their immune systems are not very robust and they're going
to find every hard to fight off a virus we've only just discovered that the new
coronavirus is actually transmitted from one person to another it was hoped at
first actually that it just came from animals all coronaviruses do but now it looks
as though it is actually passed from one human being to another so we've got
people-to-people transmission because the markets been closed for some time and
there are cases in people who've never been near it so there actually isn't any
treatment at the moment at all, because this is a virus antibiotic, won't work
that they only work against bacteria not viruses so really you want to know
antiviral treatment but none of the flu drugs that we've got we have got a couple
of those will work on this a coronavirus is different from a flu virus so there actually
isn't any treatment at the moment at this one is scary because it is a brand new
a virus so we don't know how it is going to behave but I have to say perhaps
ought to put it in the context of some of the other things I went to Serra Leone
to cover the West Africa outbreak of Ebola and that was killing more than half of
all those people who were infected SARS which was a novel coronavirus just like
this one back in2002 did it end up causing global panic and that was largely
because nobody had ever seen it before but also the death rate was at around 10%
well here so far we're talking about a death rate of 2% which is a lot less and
it does look as if many of those people actually have had underlying health problems
which would make it more likely that they would die they could equally have died
of flu, so you have to put into that context I thank you.
Thanks for reading
Thanks for reading
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