Coronavirus Outbreak ‘Just Too Good At Spreading'

As the killer Chinese virus reaches Australia, an expert tells WHO about the ‘perfect storm’ that puts us in grave danger

Confirmation that the deadly coronavirus had spread to Australia was news that the nation had been dreading – but bracing for – with the death toll from the contagious disease rising steeply worldwide since it first emerged from China in early December.

“We can try and identify infected travellers using fever and questionnaires at the border,” University of Queensland associate professor Dr Ian Mackay, tells WHO. “But human-adapted respiratory viruses are just too good at spreading.”

As WHO went to press, five patients in Australia had been identified as having the illness as Chinese authorities said the death toll from the outbreak had jumped to 81, with over 2700 confirmed cases worldwide including in France, the US, South Korea, Japan, Nepal, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand and Hong Kong, as well as Australia. China’s President Xi Jinping convened an emergency meeting, warning of a “grave situation”, according to the country’s state media.

The first patient identified in Australia was a Chinese man in Melbourne who recently spent time in the city of Wuhan, where authorities have pinpointed the South China Seafood City Market (which also sells chickens, bats, and marmots) as the likely source of the respiratory virus.

“We’ve only known about this virus for less than a month and already have much information, but there’s much we still need,” says Dr Mackay. “It can pass from human to human and keep going, but whether it does this very easily or not remains unclear.”