Busting the coronavirus myths

Yes, it is worse than the flu: busting the coronavirus myths

The truth about the protective value of face masks and how easy it is to catch Covid-19
Hannah Devlin Science correspondent

 @hannahdev

Fri 28 Feb 2020 13.59 GMT

 People wear protective masks on the subway in São Paulo, Brazil. Photograph: Victor Moriyama/Getty Images

Claim: ‘It is no more dangerous than winter flu’

Many individuals who get coronavirus will experience nothing worse than seasonal flu symptoms, but the overall profile of the disease, including its mortality rate, looks more serious. At the start of an outbreak the apparent mortality rate can be an overestimate if a lot of mild cases are being missed. But this week, a WHO expert suggested that this has not been the case with Covid-19. Bruce Aylward, who led an international mission to China to learn about the virus and the country’s response, said the evidence did not suggest that we were only seeing the tip of the iceberg. If borne out by further testing, this could mean that current estimates of a roughly 1% fatality rate are accurate. This would make Covid-19 about 10 times more deadly than seasonal flu, which is estimated to kill between 290,000 and 650,000 people a year globally.

Claim: ‘It only kills the elderly, so younger people can relax’

Most people who are not elderly and do not have underlying health conditions will not become critically ill from Covid-19. But the illness still has a higher chance of leading to serious respiratory symptoms than seasonal flu and there are other at-risk groups – health workers, for instance, are more vulnerable because they are likely to have higher exposure to the virus. The actions that young, healthy people take, including reporting symptoms and following quarantine instructions, will have an important role in protecting the most vulnerable in society and in shaping the overall trajectory of the outbreak.

Claim: ‘Face masks don’t work’

Wearing a face mask is not an iron clad guarantee that you won’t get sick – viruses can also transmit through the eyes and tiny viral particles, known as aerosols, can still penetrate masks. However, masks are effective at capturing droplets, which is the main transmission route of coronavirus, and some studies have estimated a roughly five-fold protection versus no barrier. If you are likely to be in close contact with someone infected, a mask cuts the chance of the disease being passed on. If you’re just walking around town and not in close contact with others, wearing a mask is unlikely to make any difference.

Coronavirus: How to protect yourself

Wash your hands: Wet your hands with clean, running water. Apply soap. Lather your hands, including the backs, between your fingers, and under your nails. Scrub for at least 20 seconds. Rinse.

Cover your mouth and nose with a tissue when you cough or sneeze, then throw the tissue in a bin and wash hands. If you don't have a tissue to hand, cough or sneeze into your elbow rather than your hands.

 Wash your hands: wet your hands with clean, running water. Apply soap. Lather your hands, including the backs, between your fingers, and under your nails. Scrub for at least 20 seconds. Rinse.

 Cover your mouth and nose with a tissue when you cough or sneeze, then throw the tissue in a bin and wash hands. If you don’t have a tissue to hand, cough or sneeze into your elbow rather than your hands.

 Face masks offer some protection as they block liquid droplets. However, they do not block smaller aerosol particles that can pass through the material of the mask.

 Wash your hands: wet your hands with clean, running water. Apply soap. Lather your hands, including the backs, between your fingers, and under your nails. Scrub for at least 20 seconds. Rinse.

 Cover your mouth and nose with a tissue when you cough or sneeze, then throw the tissue in a bin and wash hands. If you don’t have a tissue to hand, cough or sneeze into your elbow rather than your hands.

 Face masks offer some protection as they block liquid droplets. However, they do not block smaller aerosol particles that can pass through the material of the mask.

 Seek early medical help by phone if you have a fever, cough and difficulty breathing, and share your travel history with healthcare providers.

 Wash your hands: wet your hands with clean, running water. Apply soap. Lather your hands, including the backs, between your fingers, and under your nails. Scrub for at least 20 seconds. Rinse.

 Cover your mouth and nose with a tissue when you cough or sneeze, then throw the tissue in a bin and wash hands. If you don’t have a tissue to hand, cough or sneeze into your elbow rather than your hands.

 Face masks offer some protection as they block liquid droplets. However, they do not block smaller aerosol particles that can pass through the material of the mask.

 Seek early medical help by phone if you have a fever, cough and difficulty breathing, and share your travel history with healthcare providers.

 If you have returned from an affected area in China, Iran, South Korea or Italy in the last two weeks, stay indoors and avoid contact with other people for 14 days. This means not going to work, school or public areas.

 If you have returned from an infected area and develop a high temperature, cough, runny nose, sore throat or difficulty breathing do not leave your home until you have been given advice by a doctor.

 Wash your hands: wet your hands with clean, running water. Apply soap. Lather your hands, including the backs, between your fingers, and under your nails. Scrub for at least 20 seconds. Rinse.

 Cover your mouth and nose with a tissue when you cough or sneeze, then throw the tissue in a bin and wash hands. If you don’t have a tissue to hand, cough or sneeze into your elbow rather than your hands.

 Face masks offer some protection as they block liquid droplets. However, they do not block smaller aerosol particles that can pass through the material of the mask.

 Seek early medical help by phone if you have a fever, cough and difficulty breathing, and share your travel history with healthcare providers.

 If you have returned from an affected area in China, Iran, South Korea or Italy in the last two weeks, stay indoors and avoid contact with other people for 14 days. This means not going to work, school or public areas.

 If you have returned from an infected area and develop a high temperature, cough, runny nose, sore throat or difficulty breathing do not leave your home until you have been given advice by a doctor.

 Wash your hands: wet your hands with clean, running water. Apply soap. Lather your hands, including the backs, between your fingers, and under your nails. Scrub for at least 20 seconds. Rinse.

 Cover your mouth and nose with a tissue when you cough or sneeze, then throw the tissue in a bin and wash hands. If you don’t have a tissue to hand, cough or sneeze into your elbow rather than your hands.

 Face masks offer some protection as they block liquid droplets. However, they do not block smaller aerosol particles that can pass through the material of the mask.

 Seek early medical help by phone if you have a fever, cough and difficulty breathing, and share your travel history with healthcare providers.

 If you have returned from an affected area in China, Iran, South Korea or Italy in the last two weeks, stay indoors and avoid contact with other people for 14 days. This means not going to work, school or public areas.

 Wash your hands: wet your hands with clean, running water. Apply soap. Lather your hands, including the backs, between your fingers, and under your nails. Scrub for at least 20 seconds. Rinse.

 Cover your mouth and nose with a tissue when you cough or sneeze, then throw the tissue in a bin and wash hands. If you don’t have a tissue to hand, cough or sneeze into your elbow rather than your hands.

 Face masks offer some protection as they block liquid droplets. However, they do not block smaller aerosol particles that can pass through the material of the mask.

 Seek early medical help by phone if you have a fever, cough and difficulty breathing, and share your travel history with healthcare providers.

 If you have returned from an affected area in China, Iran, South Korea or Italy in the last two weeks, stay indoors and avoid contact with other people for 14 days. This means not going to work, school or public areas.

 If you have returned from an infected area and develop a high temperature, cough, runny nose, sore throat or difficulty breathing do not leave your home until you have been given advice by a doctor.

Claim: ‘You need to be with an infected person for 10 minutes’

 Wash your hands: wet your hands with clean, running water. Apply soap. Lather your hands, including the backs, between your fingers, and under your nails. Scrub for at least 20 seconds. Rinse.

 Cover your mouth and nose with a tissue when you cough or sneeze, then throw the tissue in a bin and wash hands. If you don’t have a tissue to hand, cough or sneeze into your elbow rather than your hands.

 Face masks offer some protection as they block liquid droplets. However, they do not block smaller aerosol particles that can pass through the material of the mask.

 Seek early medical help by phone if you have a fever, cough and difficulty breathing, and share your travel history with healthcare providers.

 If you have returned from an affected area in China, Iran, South Korea or Italy in the last two weeks, stay indoors and avoid contact with other people for 14 days. This means not going to work, school or public areas.

 Wash your hands: wet your hands with clean, running water. Apply soap. Lather your hands, including the backs, between your fingers, and under your nails. Scrub for at least 20 seconds. Rinse.

 Cover your mouth and nose with a tissue when you cough or sneeze, then throw the tissue in a bin and wash hands. If you don’t have a tissue to hand, cough or sneeze into your elbow rather than your hands.

 Face masks offer some protection as they block liquid droplets. However, they do not block smaller aerosol particles that can pass through the material of the mask.

 Seek early medical help by phone if you have a fever, cough and difficulty breathing, and share your travel history with healthcare providers.

 If you have returned from an affected area in China, Iran, South Korea or Italy in the last two weeks, stay indoors and avoid contact with other people for 14 days. This means not going to work, school or public areas.

 If you have returned from an infected area and develop a high temperature, cough, runny nose, sore throat or difficulty breathing do not leave your home until you have been given advice by a doctor.

Claim: ‘You need to be with an infected person for 10 minutes’

For flu, some hospital guidelines define exposure as being within six feet of an infected person who sneezes or coughs for 10 minutes or longer. However, it is possible to be infected with shorter interactions or even by picking the virus up from contaminated surfaces, although this is thought to be a less common route of transmission.

Claim: ‘A vaccine could be ready within a few months’

Scientists were quick out of the gates in beginning development of a vaccine for the new coronavirus, helped by the early release of the genetic sequence by Chinese researchers. The development of a viable vaccine continues apace, with several teams now testing candidates in animal experiments. However, the incremental trials required before a commercial vaccine could be rolled out are still a lengthy undertaking – and an essential one to ensure that even rare side-effects are spotted. A commercially available vaccine within a year would be quick.

Claim: ‘If a pandemic is declared, there is nothing more we can do to stop the spread’

A pandemic is defined as worldwide spread of a new disease – but the exact threshold for declaring one is quite vague. In practice, the actions being taken would not change whether or not a pandemic is declared. Containment measures are not simply about eliminating the disease altogether. Delaying the onset of an outbreak or decreasing the peak is crucial in allowing health systems to cope with a sudden influx of patients.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/28/coronavirus-truth-myths-flu-covid-19-face-masks

Coronavirus may have been in Italy for weeks before it was detected

Test results worry experts as new cases emerge in Nigeria, Mexico and New Zealand

Hannah Devlin, Peter Beaumont, Lorenzo Tondo in Palermo and Jason Burke in Johannesburg

Fri 28 Feb 2020 18.07 GMT

 Tourists wearing protective face masks walk in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in the centre of Milan. Photograph: Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty

The new coronavirus may have circulated in northern Italy for weeks before it was detected, seriously complicating efforts to track and control its rapid spread across Europe.

The claim follows laboratory tests that isolated a strain of the virus from an Italian patient, which showed genetic differences compared with the original strain isolated in China and two Chinese tourists who became sick in Rome.

Massimo Galli, professor of infectious diseases at the University of Milan and director of infectious diseases at the Luigi Sacco hospital in Milan, said preliminary evidence suggested the virus could have been spreading below the radar in the quarantined areas.

“I can’t absolutely confirm any safe estimate of the time of the circulation of the virus in Italy, but … some first evidence suggest that the circulation of the virus is not so recent in Italy,” he said, amid suggestions the virus may have been present since mid-January.

The beginnings of the outbreak, which has now infected more than 821 people in the country and has spread from Italy across Europe, were probably seeded at least two or three weeks before the first detection and possibly before flights between Italy and China were suspended at the end of January, say experts.

The findings will be deeply concerning for health officials across Europe who have so far concentrated their containment efforts on identifying individuals returning from high risk areas for the virus, including Italy, and people with symptoms as well as those who have come in contact with them.

The new claim emerged as the World Health Organization warned that the outbreak was getting bigger and could soon appear in almost every country. The impact risk was now very high at a global level, it said.

“The scenario of the coronavirus reaching multiple countries, if not all countries around the world, is something we have been looking at and warning against since quite a while,” a spokesman said.

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A viral outbreak that began in China has infected more than 83,000 people globally, with almost 3,000 deaths. As the list of countries hit by the illness edged towards 60, with Mexico, Belarus, Lithuania, New Zealand, Nigeria, Azerbaijan and the Netherlands reporting their first cases, the threats to livelihoods were increasingly eyed as warily as the threats to lives.

While there were some tentative indications the outbreak may be slowing in China, South Korea’s tally of infections exceeded 2,300, while cases in France and Germany continued to rise.

With new cases being reported across Europe, and the first case confirmed in sub-Saharan Africa – in an Italian man who recently returned to work in Nigeria – governments were increasingly moving towards proposing ever more stringent measures to control the global outbreak

As $5tn (£3.9tn) has been wiped off global stock markets amid fears over the impact of the virus, Switzerland moved to ban all gatherings of more than 1,000 people until 15 March, announcing the postponement of the Geneva Motor Show.

The British budget airline easyJet announced it would axe 500 flights to Italy, alongside plans for freezes on hiring and pay, as other airlines announced similar measures.

In Iran, where there has been one of the most serious outbreaks outside of China, with 34 people known to have died and 388 infected, the government announced on state television on Friday that all schools would be closing for three days from Saturday.

“Based on assessments, it was felt that there was a need for closing all the schools in the country and for this reason all the schools in the country will be closed for three days starting from tomorrow,” the country’s health minister, Saeed Namaki, said.

Similar measures were under way in Japan, prompting angry reactions from parents and teachers, who on Friday were told by the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, that all schools would close for a month.

In another drastic move, the northern island of Hokkaido, where there has been the largest number of cases in Japan, on Friday declared a state of emergency. Its population of about 5 million people were told to refrain from venturing outside their homes over the weekend.

Meanwhile authorities in Moscow announced they were deporting 88 people who they said had violated the country’s quarantine measures.

The Nigerian case is just the third to be confirmed in Africa– a fact that has puzzled health specialists given the continent’s close ties to China – and was not picked up for 48 hours, part of a familiar pattern in the spread of the disease from California to Germany.

According to Nigerian officials, the Italian man affected by Covid-19 stayed in a hotel near the airport on the evening of 24 February, then continued to his place of work in neighbouring Ogun state.

He was treated on 26 February at his company’s medical facility before health practitioners called government biosecurity officers, who transferred him on 27 February to a containment facility in Yaba, Lagos.

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This World Health Organization warned that porous borders, a continuing flow of travellers and poorly resourced healthcare systems meant the risk of an outbreak across Africa was “very, very high” and raised significant concerns about the ability of “fragile health systems” to cope.

Experts, meanwhile, said the scale of the task involved in tracing suspected cases would put strain on developed countries.

“The worry is that there may be other countries that are less prepared, and that the virus may become more widespread worldwide,” said Martin Hibberd, professor of emerging infectious disease at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

“If that were to happen, even [developed] systems would possibly struggle to be able to check every possible suspect.”

In other developments, Mexico’s assistant health secretary announced that the country now had two confirmed cases of coronavirus.

And at least 23 guests left H10 Costa Adeje Palace hotel in Tenerife on Friday, four days into a 14-day imposed quarantine, after the Canary Islands regional government on Thursday cleared 130 holidaymakers to leave the hotel. About 700 holidaymakers remained quarantined in the compound.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/28/coronavirus-may-have-been-in-italy-for-weeks-before-it-was-detected