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CONCEPT – CORONAVIRUS UPDATE MARCH 2020
Read more on - Polity | Economy | Schemes | S&T | Environment
- The Korean clusters: South Korea announced hundreds of new coronavirus cases in the space of only a few days and raised its infectious disease alert to the highest level. The surge in cases centred around two main clusters from a church in Daegu city and a nearby hospital. The new outbreak has pushed South Korea’s tally of confirmed cases much higher than anywhere else outside of China. The virus was first confirmed in the country on Jan. 20, 2020, when a 35-year-old Chinese woman who flew from Wuhan, China to Incheon international airport, which serves Seoul, was isolated. In the four weeks following the incident, South Korea managed to avoid a major outbreak with only 30 people contracting the virus, despite many interactions between those later confirmed as being sick and hundreds more people being identified as contacts of the sick patients.
- Patient 31: This situation changed with the emergence of “Patient 31.” A member of a Shincheonji church in Daegu, 300km southeast of Seoul, became a “super-spreader ” of the virus. The 61-year-old woman, who was identified as the country’s 31st confirmed case, took part in services at the Daegu branch of the church last week and has since been connected to an additional 455 cases among Shincheonji members nationwide, according to investigations by the Korea Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC).
- Second cluster: A second major cluster emerged from a nearby hospital in Cheongdo, a county close to Daegu. Authorities are investigating links between the church in Daegu and a funeral service at the hospital, which a number of church members attended from January 31-February 2. If confirmed, it means Patient 31 could be linked to both clusters. Between Daegu and Cheongdo county, the areas account for around 80 percent of the cases in the entire country. Authorities are still investigating how Patient 31 contracted the virus, having no recent record of overseas travel or earlier known contact with other confirmed cases.
- Authoritarian China: Beijing has long said that the Chinese system of one-party rule and top-down decision-making has brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and is the most effective form of governance for the world’s most populous country. When faced with the brewing public health crisis brought on by the Covid-19 epidemic in the central Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of 2019 that same system acted in ways unheard of under democratic forms of government. They included the shutdown of a city of 11 million people, almost three times the population of Los Angeles, spread over an area five times the size of London. And that was just for starters. It does not take much of an imagination to speculate that such measures in either of those Western cities would have resulted in public uproar and protests on the streets. In the West, public would protest, but not in China. But that points to the potential flaws in the same centralised China system that restricts information flow. It also stresses following orders from above, which has been shown to have sped up the response in some respects, but delayed it in others.
- Nature of the novel coronavirus: The new coronavirus has an HIV-like mutation that means its ability to bind with human cells could be up to 1,000 times as strong as the Sars virus, according to new research by scientists in China and Europe. The discovery could help to explain not only how the infection has spread but also where it came from and how best to fight it. Scientists showed that Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome) entered the human body by binding with a receptor protein called ACE2 on a cell membrane. And some early studies suggested that the new coronavirus, which shares about 80 per cent of the genetic structure of Sars, might follow a similar path. But the ACE2 protein does not exist in large quantities in healthy people, and this partly helped to limit the scale of the Sars outbreak of 2002-03, in which infected about 8,000 people around the world. Other highly contagious viruses, including HIV and Ebola, target an enzyme called furin, which works as a protein activator in the human body. Many proteins are inactive or dormant when they are produced and have to be “cut” at specific points to activate their various functions.
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