2019 Novel coronavirus: where we are and what we know

Abstract

There is a current worldwide outbreak of a new type of coronavirus (2019-nCoV), which originated from Wuhan in China and has now spread to 17 other countries. Governments are under increased pressure to stop the outbreak spiraling into a global health emergency. At this stage, preparedness, transparency, and sharing of information are crucial to risk assessments and beginning outbreak control activities. This information should include reports from outbreak sites and from laboratories supporting the investigation. This paper aggregates and consolidates the virology, epidemiology, clinical management strategies from both English and Chinese literature, official news channels, and other official government documents. In addition, by fitting the number of infections with a single-term exponential model, we report that the infection is spreading at an exponential rate, with a doubling period of 1.8 days.

The SARS-CoV-2 outbreak: What we know

“…Wild animals and bats are considered as the natural reservoir hosts and play a crucial role in transmitting various viruses, including Ebola, Nipah, Coronavirus and others [6,15] . SARS-CoV-2 is the seventh member of the family coronaviruses, which is the beta-CoV with over 70% similarity in genetic sequence to SRAS-nCoV [16]. Like SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, and many other coronaviruses, SARS-CoV-2 likely originated in bats, but it requires further confirmation whether pneumonia infected by the SARS-CoV-2 is transmitted directly from bats or through an intermediate host [9,17,18] .Recent research has found that the virus is 96% identical at the whole-genome level to a bat coronavirus, which means bats is the most possible host of the SARS-CoV-2 [17,18] .…”

“…Also, Ji and colleagues [19] demonstrated that snack as possible virus reservoir for human infection. And Zhu et al [16] indicated that bats and minks maybe the two potential hosts of the novel coronavirus, while the minks may be the intermediate hosts of this virus. Subsequently, studies have shown that pangolins are potential intermediate hosts, but in general, intermediate hosts may have multiple hosts [20] .…”

“…WHO has published their estimation of R0 to be 2.0-2.5 using early information [28] . Li et al [7] analyzed data on the first 425 confirmed cases in Wuhan and found that the R0 to be 2.2, without specifying their modelling method Jonathan Read and his colleagues [16] from Lancaster University who used a deterministic Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Recovered (SEIR) metapopulation transmission model to determine the R0 to be around 3.1. Majumder and his colleagues [29] used Incidence Decay and Exponential Adjustment (IDEA) model to estimate the R0 to be 2.0-3.3 (The study did not published yet, available at SSRN).…”

Angiotensin receptor blockers as tentative SARS‐CoV‐2 therapeutics

“…At the time of writing this commentary (February 2020), the death toll from the COVID-19 epidemic caused by coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which emerged in late December 2019 in Wuhan, China (World Health Organization, 2019), has surpassed the combined death toll of the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) epidemic of [2002][2003] and the MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) epidemic of 2013 combined (Mahase, 2020). This epidemic seems to be spreading at an exponential rate, with a doubling period of 1.8 days, and there are fears that it might progress to pandemic scales (Cheng & Shan, 2020).…”

Control Strategies to Curtail Transmission of COVID-19

“…Basic reproduction number ( ) 0 R for the model can be established using the next generation matrix method [4,5]. The basic reproduction number ( ) 0 R is obtained as the spectral radius of matrix 1 ( ) FV − at disease free equilibrium point.…”