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What happens if you get infected by the new coronavirus?

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China said the death toll from the new coronavirus surged past 1,000 on Tuesday, as Beijing stepped up efforts to treat tens of thousands of sick people and the World Health Organization (WHO) urged the world to “fight this virus before it gets out of control”.

Since the new type of virus was first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in December, it has infected more than 40,000 people and spread to two dozen countries.

The rapid advance of the virus – labelled 2019-nCov – has triggered fear across the globe, despite all but two of the deaths and 99 percent of the infections reported as occurring in mainland China. As the alarm spread, scientists and researchers around the world have ramped up efforts to understand the new virus and how it affects the human body.

Here is what we know about the 2019-nCov and what happens if you are infected.

‘Varying levels of severity’
The 2019-nCov belongs to a family of viruses that can cause respiratory illnesses in humans such as the common cold and the more severe diseases such as the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).Thought to have jumped to a human from an as-yet-unidentified animal source, the novel coronavirus spreads primarily through respiratory droplets, such as those generated when an infected person coughs or sneezes.It attacks the respiratory tract, causing a range of symptoms, according to Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, at the WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme.

“You have mild cases, which look like the common cold, which have some respiratory symptoms, sore throat, runny nose, fever, all the way through pneumonia. And there can be varying levels of severity of pneumonia all the way through multi-organ failure and death,” she told reporters in Geneva last week.

However, in most cases, symptoms have remained mild.

“We’ve seen some data on about 17,000 cases and overall 82 percent of those are mild, 15 percent of those are severe and 3 percent of those are classified as critical,” said Van Kerkhove.

What happens if you catch the virus?
A study of 138 patients infected with new virus in Wuhan, published in the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) on February 7, showed the most common symptoms were fever, fatigue and dry cough. A third of the patients also reported muscle pain and difficulty breathing, while about 10 percent had atypical symptoms, including diarrhoea and nausea.

The study said while most cases appeared to be mild, all the patients developed pneumonia.

About a third subsequently developed severe breathing difficulties, requiring treatment in the intensive care unit. The critically ill had older and other underlying conditions such as diabetes and hypertension. “The median age of patients is between 49 and 56 years,” JAMA said, adding: “Cases in children have been rare.”

Six out of the 138 patients died. The figure amounts to a 4.3 percent death rate, which is higher than estimates from other parts of China. So far, less than 2 percent of the total number of infected people have died from the virus, according to official figures. But that rate could change since the outbreak is still in its early days.

Meanwhile, a study published on January 24 in The Lancet, a medical journal found what it called a “cytokine storm” in infected patients who were severely ill. The condition is a severe immune reaction in which the body produces immune cells and proteins that can destroy other organs.

Some experts say this could explain deaths in younger patients who have died from the virus. Statistics from China show some people in their 30s and 50s who are not known to have prior medical issues have also died from the disease.A timeline of how the disease progresses
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 JAMA study did not give a timeline for when the deaths occurred.

However, an earlier study published in the Journal of Medical Virology on January 29 said on average, people who died do so within 14 days of the onset of the disease.

The New England Journal of Medicine, in a study published on January 31, also offered a look at how the coronavirus infection affects the body over time.

The study examined medical data of a 35-year-old man, who was 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. By day 14, he was asymptomatic except for a mild cough.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA NEWS


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