WHO holds emergency meeting as coronavirus death toll hits 170

The World Health Organisation’s director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced the WHO’s emergency committee would meet today to discuss the coronavirus outbreak. He had just returned from meeting with officials in China, including president Xi Jinping.
Last week, in accordance with the committee’s recommendation, Tedros declined to declare the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern, or PHEIC. Their argument was that Chinese health officials were sufficiently equipped to combat the outbreak.
However, Tedros said he was reconvening the committee because in the meantime, Japan, Germany, and Vietnam have reported limited human-to-human transmission of the virus.
“This potential for further global spread is why I called the [committee],” Tedros tweeted. He also said it was a human error in last week’s WHO reports that referred to the global risk of the outbreak as “moderate” instead of “high”.
“What we know at this stage, this is still obviously a very active outbreak and information is being updated and changing by the hour”, said Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s health emergencies program.
Meanwhile, the death toll rose to 170, with more than 1,700 new infections confirmed. The National Health Commission said that Tibet reported its first case as well. The Philippines, India, Finland and the United Arab Emirates are among the latest countries to report their first cases.
France, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Nepal, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, US, Japan, Malaysia, Australia, Canada, and Sri Lanka have all confirmed patients who have contracted the disease.
There is currently no vaccine for the virus and antibiotics are of no use. The recovery depends on the strength of the patient’s immune system. It is known that the patients who have died have been already in a poor health condition.
The WHO estimated an incubation period of two to ten days. Among 34 patients examined by researchers from the Netherlands, the average period was 5.8 days. However, health authorities in most countries have set an isolation period of 14 days just to be safe.
The WHO said the death rate is 2%, but the calculations are rough as it is not easy to estimate how many undetected cases are there. According to epidemiologists, fatality rate can change as the virus is expected to mutate.
US health officials are working to prevent the outbreak. The US Center for Disease Control said it is already doing diagnostic tests for coronavirus vaccine. CDC said its officials are in the midst of developing a candidate vaccine to innoculate individuals against the virus. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said that the CDC could launch a clinical trial of a potential vaccine within the next three months.
Alex Azar, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, said that thanks to the Chinese officials’ transparency, “within one week, the CDC had invented a rapid diagnostic test. Within two weeks, we have a candidate vaccine that we’re working on”.
Drugmaker Johnson & Johnson also announced it began to work on developing a vaccine. Three separate research teams backed by a global coalition last week said they will start a research on developing vaccines. It will be conducted by drug developers Moderna, Inovio Pharma, and a team at the University of Queensland, Australia. The American biotechnology company Gilead Sciences joined the drugmakers by announcing it was assessing whether its experimental Ebola treatment could be used against the coronavirus.