A new study shows that the novel coronavirus started showing up weeks earlier than Chinese authorities suggested.
Barely a month ago, China announced the outbreak of a mysterious virus in the megalopolis of Wuhan. The first analyzes suggest that it could have been transmitted to humans by a form of animal life (bats, snakes?) in a city market. But a recent study published in The Lancet questions this information.
During this work, the researchers indeed examined the clinical records of the first 41 patients confirmed carriers of the 2019-nCoV virus.
According to their findings, more than a third of the first cases did not even frequent the seafood market in Wuhan city . In addition, the very first case identified, who also did not frequent the market, fell ill on December 1, 2019, approximately two weeks before the first official announcements communicated by the Chinese authorities.
If indeed this first person did not frequent the seafood market in the city of Wuhan, then the question of the reservoir of the virus arises today more than ever. For Daniel Lucey, infectious disease physician at Georgetown University Medical Center , it is possible that the first cases were exposed to the virus in a different market.
In addition, still according to the newspaper, the first person to die of the virus on January 9, from Wuhan, transmitted the virus to his wife when she had no frequented the city market. We also learn that on January 10, five members of a family from the city of Shenzhen, passing through Wuhan, were also infected without having visited the market. Back home, they would then have transmitted the virus to another member of their entourage.
We note that these two examples of potential spread occurred nearly two weeks before Chinese authorities confirmed the first cases of human-to-human transmission, on January 20 .
In view of this new information, it is therefore possible that the Chinese bureaucracy, known to be particularly rigid, deliberately delayed the dissemination of information regarding the situation on the ground.
“There are a lot of internal processes that have to go through bureaucracy in China to get official statements from the central government , explains Alexandra Phelan, a member of the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University. This rigidity means that information can come out very, very slowly” .
“The fact that the Lancet report is different from the first official Chinese account raises huge concerns about the veracity of information from China , underlines Steven Hoffman, director of the Global Strategy Lab. If China intentionally withholds information, it would not only be bad for public health but also illegal under international law “.
We have known for a few weeks, thanks to genetic sequencing carried out by the Chinese authorities, that this virus belongs to the Coronaviridae family. Until now, if we therefore had his "identity card" available, we did not have a precise image of this new strain. It is now done.
Researchers have indeed succeeded in photographing the virus using an electron microscope. They just published their images in The New England Journal of Medicine .
On the photo on the left, we can see free particles of the 2019-nCoV virus imaged here in negative staining. On the picture on the right, the viral particles, whose diameter is between 60 and 140 nm , are photographed in the cells of the respiratory epithelium of infected patients.
We remind you that for the moment, there no vaccine available for coronavirus 2019-nCoV. Nevertheless, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) has already established three partnerships to develop possible treatments.
These partners are US-based biotech Inovio Pharma, the University of Queensland, Australia, and US-based biotech Moderna, which works with the US National Allergy Institute and infectious diseases.
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