DR. IVAN HUNG & DR. SARAH BORWEIN ~ Kristie Lu Stout
Kristie Lu Stout, “Hong Kong: “Is The coronavirus is man-made.”
Dr. Ivan Hung, Professor of Medicine, Assistant Dean, University of Hong Kong:
“If you look at the virus itself, if you look at the phylogenetic tree,
we find that basically the virus pops very nicely in between the beta coronaviruses
and the SARS coronaviruses. So we believe that this is actually
a natural evolution of this novel coronavirus.”
Kristie Lu Stout: “So it didn’t come from a lab in China. This wasn’t bioengineered.”
Dr. Ivan Hung, Professor of Medicine, Assistant Dean, University of Hong Kong: “Unlikely.”
”SINCE THE OUTBREAK BEGAN, THERE HAS BEEN A WAVE OF MISINFORMATION,
PROMPTING THIS OPEN LETTER BY SCIENTISTS IN “THE LANCET”:
“CONSPIRACY THEORIES DO NOTHING BUT CREATE FEAR, RUMOURS, AND PREJUDICE
THAT JEOPARDISE OUR GLOBAL COLLABORATION IN
THE FIGHT AGAINST THIS VIRUS.”
Kristie Lu Stout: “My pet can give me the virus because we know that a pet here in
Hong Kong has tested positive for coronavirus and was placed under quarantine…
”Dr. Sarah Borwein, Partner, Central Health Medical Practice, Hong Kong, GP, and Infectious Disease Expert: “It’s very unlikely and more likely that the dog has been environmentally contaminated.”
Dr. Ivan Hung, Professor of Medicine, Assistant Dean, University of Hong Kong:
“Even though it’s contaminated, you won’t get a very high viral load and very unlikely
that you can actually be transmitted from the pets to you. It’s very unlikely.”
Kristie Lu Stout: “Now this is a big one. ‘Wearing a mask will not protect me from the virus’ because
you have the US Surgeon General telling people you don’t need to buy a mask, it is not effective. Is it?”
Dr. Ivan Hung, Professor of Medicine, Assistant Dean, University of Hong Kong:
“If you look at the data in Hong Kong, wearing a mask is probably the most
important thing in terms of infection control. And it not only brings down the cases of coronaviruses,
but it also brings down influenza. In fact, this is now the influenza season,
and we hardly see any influenza cases. And that is because the masks actually
protected not only against coronaviruses but also against the influenza
viruses as well. ”
Kristie Lu Stout: “The coronavirus is less deadly than the flu. How do they compare?”
Dr. Ivan Hung, Professor of Medicine, Assistant Dean, University of Hong Kong:
“If you look at the mortality rate, so far, currently it stands at 3.4% because I think recently
has been pulled up by the Iranian mortality but otherwise if you look at the thousand cases
being reported by Professor Zhong Nanshan in New England Journal of Medicine,
basically the mortality rate is around 1.4% or probably even going to go lower as the denominator
is getting bigger. So, it still stands above 1%, for influenza, it’s 0.1% or
even lower depending on what seasons you are. So it’s still 10 times more deadly
compared to influenza.”
Kristie Lu Stout: “The virus will go away in April.” A lot of people think so,
including President Donald Trump. Will it?”
Dr. Sarah Borwein, Partner, Central Health Medical Practice, Hong Kong, GP, and Infectious Disease Expert: “It is very speculative. And some people partly say that because SARS went away in April-May,
but when it’s warm here, it’s going to be cold somewhere else.
We’ve got a southern hemisphere too. ”
Dr. Ivan Hung, Professor of Medicine, Assistant Dean, University of Hong Kong:
“With SARS, it only affected a few countries. But this time it’s really a pandemic scale.
So basically it can come back, especially in the southern hemisphere and then alternate
with the northern hemisphere.”
Watch the Interview Here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
time_continue=3&v=3G0zhZ7sDik&feature=emb_title
A Tale of Two Cities: How Hong Kong Has Controlled its Coronavirus Outbreak,
While N.Y.C. Scrambles – Posted on March 9, 2020 by Jerri-Lynn Scofield
A possible new clue in coronavirus transmission
Sweeping coronavirus testing of the entire 4800 crew of the U.S..S. Theodore Roosevelt
may have revealed a clue about the pandemic: Of the majority of the 600 positive cases –
60% are asymptomatic, with 6 hospitalized and 1 having died officials say.
In medicine, a disease is considered asymptomatic if a patient is a carrier for a disease or infection but experiences no symptoms. A condition might be asymptomatic if it fails to show the noticeable symptoms with which it is usually associated. Asymptomatic infections are also called subclinical infections.
Authorities say finding ‘patient zero’ would help answer crucial questions about the origin
of the coronavirus. As the coronavirus death toll rises, health authorities are trying to control or even halt the spreading epidemic by tracking down “patient zero” – the first person to have been infected by the disease. Covid-19, the official name of the illness caused by the virus, has infected more than 82,000 people worldwide and killed at least 2,800.
It has spread to at least 44 countries outside China.
But the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Monday that the coronavirus was “not yet”
a worldwide epidemic, or “pandemic”. Here are the essential things to know about the hunt
for patient zero. Although the term patient zero can be used interchangeably with “index case” and generally refers to the first person infected by a communicable disease in an
outbreak, in the Covid-19 epidemic, there are several patient zeros.
That is according to Sarah Borwein, who works in the infectious diseases field at Hong Kong’s
Central Health Medical Practice. “For example, we know who patient zero is in the big cluster in South Korea, and that is helping to trace all the contacts and understand what happened,” she said. “But we don’t know who patient zero was in the Iran cluster, or the cluster in Italy.”
South Korea has reported more than 1,500 confirmed Covid-19 cases and at least 13 fatalities. The biggest cluster of infections has been linked to a secretive Christian church in the southeastern city of Daegu.
At the centre of the church cluster is a 61-year-old female member of the sect, who is South Korea’s 31st case. Korea Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has described the outbreak there as a “super-spreading event”. Meanwhile, Chinese officials are still trying to trace the epidemic back to its source in China. The first coronavirus case was reported to the WHO on December 31 and has been linked to Wuhan’s Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market. However, a new study published by a team of Chinese scientists last week said the virus might have been imported from somewhere else.
The first known Covid-19 patient, a male who showed symptoms on December 8, had been
discharged but said he was not at the Huanan market, the Wuhan government
said in a Weibo post on Wednesday. “We don’t know who the very first patient zero was, presumably in Wuhan, and that leaves a lot of unanswered questions about how the outbreak started and how it initially spread,” Borwein said.
Why is it important to find them? Knowing who patient zero was would help prevent future outbreaks and provide information about how to prevent transmission, Borwein said. But as time passes, identifying the index case grows increasingly difficult.
“Figuring out who patient zero was wouldn’t give us all the answers but it would help to map the path the virus has taken and how it’s travelling,” she said. “It’s hard to draw that map without knowing where it starts.”
John Nicholls, a University of Hong Kong clinical professor in pathology, said identifying patient zero during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) epidemic in 2002-03 was
vital from an epidemiological perspective, as it highlighted the mode of its spread.
The disease, which infected over 8,000 and killed 813 people globally, was traced to a 64-year-old medical professor from Guangzhou, who had infected at least 13 tourists staying at the Metropole Hotel in Hong Kong.
But Nicholls, who was an important member of the 2003 research team that isolated and characterised the Sars coronavirus, which is in the same family as the current virus,
said the sheer number of infections in the current epidemic meant finding the patient zeros was a huge challenge. “There are so many outbreaks and hotspots around the world, and this virus appears to spread more rapidly than Sars, so it’s going to be a big challenge to accurately
pinpoint patient zero,” he said. “Epidemiological resources would be better at mitigating
the spread rather than looking back.”
Borwein, who worked as head of infection control for a hospital in Beijing and in outbreak communication during the Sars epidemic, said people must be wary of the language they use when talking about patient zero, because it had the potential to fuel xenophobia and panic.
“We talk about a ‘desperate hunt’ or a ‘panicked hunt’ for patient zero – and because coronavirus started in China, and patient zero was probably Chinese, it can easily fuel discrimination and racism,” she said.
“It’s important to understand that patient zero is a clue, not a criminal.” What are some examples of Covid-19 patient zeros? Most coronavirus patient zeros came from Wuhan in central China’s Hubei province, the epicentre of the outbreak. That includes patient zeros in South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and the Philippines. The first Covid-19 case outside China was reported on January 13 in Thailand. The patient was a 61-year-old Chinese woman from Wuhan who travelled to Bangkok with family members in a tour group.
Two days later, Japan confirmed the second coronavirus case outside China: a man in his 30s who lived in Kanagawa prefecture, southwest of Tokyo.
The man had travelled to Wuhan and been in close contact with a pneumonia patient in the city. Around a week later, on January 23, the US’ Centres for Disease Control and Prevention reported the country’s first American coronavirus case, a 35 year-old Washington state man who had visited family in Wuhan. There have also been incidents of human-to-human transmission among Covid-19 patient zeros. Vietnam confirmed two cases of the virus on January 23. A 65-year-old man from Wuhan met up with his son, 27,
who works in the country and did not travel to China.
The father developed a fever on January 17 and the son showed the same symptoms three days later, doctors said in The New England Journal of Medicine on January 28. This family cluster suggested an instance of person-to-person transmission, the WHO said. Germany also reported what is believed to be the first human-to-human transmission case in Europe on January 28.
A 33-year-old German man contracted the disease after attending a training session given by his Chinese colleague in the state of Bavaria. The female colleague, who is from Shanghai, had recently returned from visiting her parents in Wuhan, said Andreas Zapf, head of the Bavarian State Office for Health and Food Safety.
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