Coronavirus data from outside the outbreak epicenter is just as valuable as from the inside
0Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/12/21131478/coronavirus-research-china-us-case-study-symptoms-data
Reported today in The Verge.
Coronavirus data from outside the outbreak epicenter is just as valuable as from the inside
The active impact of the new coronavirus is very different in China, where tens of thousands of people are sick, than it is in the rest of the world, which only has a few dozen scattered cases. But data from both environments is helping scientists as they work to understand the virus and the illness it causes.
"With a large number of cases you get a better sense of how the virus behaves on average in a community," says Caitlin Rivers, senior associate at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. "In a place with fewer cases, you can spend more time investigating each case."
In the past week, researchers have published reports on large groups of coronavirus patients in China. One described the way the illness affected 138 patients at Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, finding that around a quarter had to be cared for in the intensive care unit and that some patients had atypical symptoms like diarrhea and nausea. The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that hospitalized patients passed the virus to 40 health care workers. Another team analyzed 1,099 patients from over 500 hospitals in China. In that set, fever and cough were the most common symptoms, and around 15 percent developed severe pneumonia. The data, which was published as a preprint, hasn't yet been peer-reviewed or published in a journal.
Those studies and others like them give researchers a bigger picture of the outbreak. "It tells us a lot about what happens when you have a lot of overwhelmed hospitals," says Angela Rasmussen, a research scientist at the Center for Infection and Immunity at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Heal