The Facts About COVID-19

As we are hit with minute-by-minute updates from around the world, experiencing the advance of Covid-19 in real time – news alerts, huge headlines, social media hysteria – there's a risk that we might lose some essential context.

Yes, this virus is obviously a massive challenge: medical, political and – perhaps most strikingly at present – social and economic. But it is worth remembering the world has never had better tools to fight it, and that if we are infected, we are very unlikely to die from it.

Nine Reasons To Be Reassured

Here are nine reassuring facts about the coronavirus:

1. We know what it is. The virus causing cases of severe pneumonia in Wuhan was identified within seven days of the official announcement on 31 December, and, three days after that, the gene sequence was available. HIV, by contrast, took two years to identify after it first appeared in mid-1981.
2. We can test for it. By 13 January – three days after the gene sequence was published – a reliable test was available, developed by scientists at the department of virology at Berlin's Charité university hospital with help from experts in Rotterdam, London and Hong Kong.
3. We know it can be contained (albeit at considerable cost). Several Chinese provinces have had no new cases for a fortnight and more are reopening their schools. In many countries, infections are in defined clusters, which should allow them to be more readily contained.
4. Catching it is not that easy (if we are careful) and we can kill it quite easily (provided we try). Frequent, careful hand washing, as we now all know, is the most effective way to stop the virus being transmitted, while a solution of hydrogen peroxide or a solution of bleach will disinfect surfaces. To be considered at high risk of catching the coronavirus, you need to live with, or have direct physical contact with, someone infected, be coughed or sneezed on by them (or pick up a used tissue), or be in face-to-face contact, within two metres. We're not talking about passing someone in the street.
5. In most cases, symptoms are mild, and young people are at very low risk. According to a study of 45,000 confirmed infections in China, 81% of cases caused only minor illness, 14% of patients had symptoms described as "severe", and just 5% were considered "critical", with about half of those resulting in death. Only 3% of cases concern people under 20; children seem barely affected by the virus at all.
6. People are recovering from it. As the daily count maintained by the Johns Hopkins CSSE shows, thousands of people around the world are making confirmed recoveries from the coronavirus every day.
7. Hundreds of scientific articles have already been written about it. Type Covid-19 or Sars-19 into the search engine of the US national library of medicine's PubMed website and you will find, barely five weeks after the emergence of the virus, 539 references to papers about it. These deal with vaccines, therapies, epidemiology, diagnosis and clinical practice.
8. Vaccine prototypes exist. Commercial pharmaceutical and biotechnology labs such as Moderna, Inovio, Sanofi and Novavax, as well as academic groups such as our very own University of Saskatchewan – many of which were already working on vaccines for similar Sars-related viruses – have preventive vaccine prototypes in development, some of which will soon be ready for human testing.
9. Dozens of treatments are already being tested. By mid-February, more than 80 clinical trials were under way for antiviral treatments, according to Nature magazine, and most have already been used successfully in treating other illnesses. So, the trial period may be shorter.

Bottom Line?

The risk of contracting COVID-19 at this point is small, and the chance of dying from it is even smaller. Most people who do get infected will have a few flu like symptoms. And, with professional care, they will make a full recovery. That is what really does happen for most victims worldwide.

Knowing the correct and most up to date information and acting upon it is the best way to keep us all healthy and stop the spread of Covid-19.

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