China virus spreads to US with health officials on high alert

An outbreak of a viral lung illnesses in central China has spread more widely across the Asian nation, sickening several hundred, and global health officials are attempting to contain an illness that has crossed borders to five countries, including the US.

Six deaths have been reported and cases have been found five other countries. US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials said Tuesday that a case had been identified in Washington from a person recently traveling in China.

Since the new coronavirus was first detected in December in China’s Wuhan province, the number of infections from the has grown to 291, with 139 of them over the past weekend. While the vast majority of the cases are in Wuhan, a city of 11 million in the eastern inland of China, infections have been reported in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Zhejiang and Henan.

Health officials still don’t know how dangerous the virus is or exactly how it spreads, but the rapid rise in illnesses has prompted tightened borders and a rapid attempt to trace contacts of those who have become ill. On Wednesday, the World Health Organization is scheduled to debate whether to declare the situation a public health emergency of international concern, a designation used for complex epidemics that can cross borders.

Russia has tightened border controls with China, and the US has set up airport checkpoints for passengers coming from China. On Tuesday, the US said that it had added new checkpoints in Atlanta and Chicago, in addition to existing checkpoints in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Some new cases have involved doctors and nurses, a sign that the virus is being transmitted from person to person. The early days of the outbreak have evoked comparisons to SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, the illness that spread through airports and hospitals around the globe in 2003, killing nearly 800 people in a matter of months.

White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham said that President Donald Trump has been briefed on the Wuhan outbreak. She would not say when the briefing occurred or who delivered it.

The infection, which can cause pneumonia in patients, has evoked comparisons to SARS. SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, originated in China and spread through airports and hospitals around the globe in a matter of months in the early 2000s.

While it isn’t clear how the Wuhan virus compares to SARS in strength or transmissibility, with the Chinese New Year travel season about to send billions of people on holiday journeys, no one wants to take a chance.

“The speed with which this virus has been identified is testament to changes in public health in China since SARS,” said Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, in a statement. “However, we know there is more to come from this outbreak -- and with travel being a huge part of the fast approaching Chinese New Year, it is right that concern levels are at the highest level.”

A World Health Organization emergency declaration could include recommendations to restrict travel or trade to stop the outbreak. The agency has formed teams at its Geneva headquarters to study the virus, its spread and its symptoms and is sending a team to China to help gather information, according to David Heymann, an infectious disease researcher in the UK who advises the agency.

A significant issue in the panel’s deliberations will be the severity of infections. Some of the deaths reported so far appear to have been in sick, elderly people, which suggests the virus poses the greatest danger to people whose health is already compromised, Heymann said.

Both the Wuhan virus, known as 2019-nCoV, and SARS belong to the family of coronaviruses, so called because of their crown-like shape. Many such viruses cross the barrier between animals and humans, as the Wuhan virus appears to have done, according to Heymann, who’s also a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who was formerly with the US CDC. Often it takes time to determine what form the new virus will take, he said.

Some viruses, like rabies, sporadically infect humans through animal contact but can’t spread from person to person. Others, like Ebola, emerge in small outbreaks, recede, and then reappear. Some of the most dangerous, like HIV, evolve into forms that infect humans in a widespread, persistent fashion.

The new virus “could be No. 2 or 3, that’s the concern,” Heymann said in an interview. “We need enough information to make a proper risk assessment.”

Despite the worries, the new virus is likely less deadly than SARS, said University of Sydney associate professor Adam Kamradt-Scott.

“It’s important to stress that this virus at the moment has been causing mild illness in the vast majority of people that have been affected,” he said in an interview on Bloomberg TV. “There’s around 10% of cases that have ended up in critical condition and there’s been deaths, but the vast majority of the 200-plus people infected have resulted in mild illness.”