WHEN word first got out in early January that a mysterious viral pneumonia had affected 44 persons in Wuhan City in China, no one could have foreseen that just 100 days later, the virus causing it would infect more than 1.4 million people worldwide and kill more than 85,000.
But those are the grim statistics in the April 9, 2020 situation report of the World Health Organization (WHO) on reported laboratory-confirmed coronavirus disease (Covid-19) cases: 1,436,198 confirmed cases globally, 82,837 reported in the last 24 hours; 85,522 deaths globally, 6,287 reported in the last 24 hours.
One hundred days since the WHO was first notified about the first cases of the illness on Dec. 31, 2019, the virus has now sickened people in 211 countries and territories.
Called the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus is genetically related to the one responsible for the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003.
SARS infected 8,437 people in 26 countries and killed 813 people from Nov. 1, 2002 to July 11, 2003, WHO data show.
So many people didn’t begin to worry until the number of cases of the new coronavirus surpassed that of SARS on Jan. 31. Still, most of the nearly 10,000 cases were in China, with just slightly more than 100 cases reported in 22 other countries. And all the over 200 deaths were in China.
US President Donald Trump was not worried. On Feb. 11, the Associated Press quoted him as saying, “Looks like in April, you know in theory when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”
It is now April, and the virus has not gone away. The United States now has the highest number of Covid-19 cases in the world at 395,030, as of April 9. In terms of deaths, its 12,740 fatalities rank third after Italy’s 17,669 and Spain’s 14,555.
As for China where it all began, the number stands at 83,249 cases and 3,344 deaths.
Signs
Warning signs for the world came early enough. Two weeks after China’s first cases were reported to the WHO, Thailand reported its first imported case of the disease from Wuhan on Jan. 13. Japan reported its own imported case from Wuhan on Jan. 15, as did South Korea on Jan. 20.
In a bid to stop the spread of the virus, China ordered a lockdown of Wuhan on Jan. 23. But five million residents had already left for the Lunar New Year holiday, bringing the virus across China and outside it.
China’s draconian measures, however, including suspending public transport, shutting businesses and confining residents to their homes—measures now being copied by other countries worldwide—enabled the social distancing that helped the nation contain its outbreak and lift its 76-day lockdown of Wuhan on April 8.
New epicenter
But the virus continued its rampage overseas. And on March 13, the WHO declared Europe the new epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Infections in Italy had surged past 15,000. Spain had over 4,000, and Germany, over 3,000 cases. The virus had infected 132,000 people in 123 countries and territories, killing 5,000. At this point, though, the United States still had only around 1,700 cases.
On March 20, news organizations reported that Chinese medical experts in Italy to help deal with the virus crisis, expressed surprise that even after Italy’s 4,000 deaths, public transport was still running in hardest-hit Milan, where people were also moving around without face masks and still having parties in hotels. Italy had reported its first two cases, Chinese tourists from Wuhan, on Jan. 31.
The rapid spread of the disease in Italy fueled fears of a contagion in the European Union where borderless travel is a feature of the 26-country Schengen Area. The fears were founded.
As of April 9, Europe made up 53 percent of the confirmed cases worldwide at 759,661 and 72 percent of the deaths at 61,516, WHO figures show. Over half of the nations in the top 20 list of the highest number of cases are in Europe.
Undetected
In the United States, New York is the epicenter of the outbreak. As of Friday, the New York metropolitan area accounted for more than half of the nation’s over 18,500 deaths.
Researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai gave insights Friday on how the cases may have exploded there. They said their molecular epidemiology study of the virus showed that New York City’s first few cases “predominately arose through untracked transmission between the United States and Europe, with limited evidence to support any direct introductions from China, where the virus originated, or other locations in Asia.”
They said the virus had been circulating undetected in the city as early as late January.
Looking to avert a disaster, India, with just 5,735 cases as of April 9, ordered its 1.3 billio people to stay home for 21 days from March 25, when it still had only 450 cases.
India’s unprecedented move was aimed at keeping the virus from spreading and overwhelming its fragile health care system as it had done in parts of Europe.
In the Philippines, the number of reported infections surged from just three on Feb. 5 to 4,000 on April 9, after local transmission confirmed on March 7 prompted the government to speed up the acquisition of test kits, and five sub-national laboratories gained the capability to conduct tests.
A more accurate picture of the contagion will be known once “mass testing” for the virus begins on April 14 at 3,000 lab tests a day, moving up to 8,000 to 10,000 tests a day by month’s end.
Only time will tell, however, whether lockdowns and mass testing will be enough to finally quash the deadly virus—or whether this is only the calm before the storm. (With AP, SunStar Philippines)