Coronavirus COVID-19

According to experts, the new coronavirus likely originated in bats. More than 75 percent of emerging diseases originate in animals; these are called zoonotic diseases, meaning they can jump from animals to people.

At least 10 outbreaks in the last century have spilled over to humans from animals such as bats, birds, and pigs.

Ebola jumped from fruit bats in west Africa 40 years ago and has killed more than 13,500 people in multiple outbreaks. The Marburg virus, SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), MERS (Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome), and Nipah also originated in bats.

The H7N9 and H5N9 bird flus, meanwhile, jumped from infected poultry to people in Chinese markets, together killing more than 1,000 people.

The 2009-2010 swine flu pandemic (also known as H1N1) started, of course, in pigs. It killed nearly 300,000 people in a global pandemic and spread to 214 countries in less than a year.

According to experts, diseases will continue to spill over from animals to humans as the global population grows. The more people there are on Earth, the more our species moves into wild habitats and encounters creatures that harbour viruses.



"Infectious diseases will continue to emerge and re-emerge. I think it's part of the world we live in now," Eric Toner, a senior scientist at the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security, previously told Business Insider.

"We're in an age of epidemics because of globalization, because of encroachment on wild environments."


Taken from businessinsider.com

According to JAMA, on average, people became short of breath within five days of the onset of their symptoms. Severe breathing trouble was observed in about eight days. The study did not give a timeline for when the deaths occurred. However, an earlier study in the Journal of Medical Virology on January 29 said that, on average, people who died did so within 14 days of the onset of the disease.

The New England Journal of Medicine, in a study on January 31 2020, also offered a look at how the coronavirus infection affects the body over time. The study examined the medical data of a 35-year-old man, the first case of infection in the United States. The first symptom was a dry cough, followed by a fever. On the third day of illness, he reported nausea and vomiting followed by diarrhoea and abdominal discomfort on the sixth day. By the ninth day, he had developed pneumonia and reported difficulty breathing. By the twelfth day, his condition had improved and his fever was subsiding. He developed a runny nose, however. On day 14, he was asymptomatic except for a mild cough. According to local media reports, he sought care on January 19 and was discharged from the hospital in the first week of February.

Event 201 simulates an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people that eventually becomes efficiently transmissible from person to person, leading to a severe pandemic. The pathogen and the disease it causes are modeled largely on SARS, but it is more transmissible in the community setting by people with mild symptoms.

The disease starts in pig farms in Brazil, quietly and slowly at first, but then it starts to spread more rapidly in healthcare settings. When it starts to spread efficiently from person to person in the low-income, densely packed neighborhoods of some of the megacities in South America, the epidemic explodes. It is first exported by air travel to Portugal, the United States, and China and then to many other countries. Although at first some countries are able to control it, it continues to spread and be reintroduced, and eventually no country can maintain control.

There is no possibility of a vaccine being available in the first year. There is a fictional antiviral drug that can help the sick but not significantly limit spread of the disease.

Since the whole human population is susceptible, during the initial months of the pandemic, the cumulative number of cases increases exponentially, doubling every week. And as the cases and deaths accumulate, the economic and societal consequences become increasingly severe.

The scenario ends at the 18-month point, with 65 million deaths. The pandemic is beginning to slow due to the decreasing number of susceptible people. The pandemic will continue at some rate until there is an effective vaccine or until 80-90 % of the global population has been exposed. From that point on, it is likely to be an endemic childhood disease.

Taken from: http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/scenario.html