On December 31, Chinese authorities alerted the World Health Organization to a mysterious respiratory illness afflicting people in Wuhan, China. On January 7, the authorities said they had identified a new virus, a coronavirus in the same family as the common cold, SARS and MERS.
Journalists like me who cover infectious disease sit up and take notice when “new coronavirus,” “SARS” and “MERS” show up in the same sentence. Add “in China,” the starting point for the SARS outbreak, and we start calling sources.
Like everyone else, we want to know if the new coronavirus, known as 2019-nCoV, could become a global threat. Many human disease outbreaks get their start in animals, and this one is no exception, though the exact source is unknown. The virus sprang up in Wuhan, and is now spreading from one person to another. Travelers are carrying the virus around the world. As of January 29, 6,074 cases had been confirmed in 17 countries, and the number is rising.
In 2003, I covered the SARS outbreak, which emerged from an animal market in China. SARS infected more than 8,000 people in 29 countries, killing 774. Those numbers don’t convey the confusion and anxiety of being in the midst of the outbreak. I traveled to Toronto, where the virus was tearing through hospitals, infecting patients and staff. In one ward, 40 percent of the nurses fell ill. Hospitals’ increased oversight of infection-control procedures finally helped stop the virus.