WHAT DO YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE DEADLY NEW CORONAVIRUS? Here's WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE DEADLY NEW CORONAVIRUS. I mean, don't panic or anything, it's not a complete nightmare yet. Soon, probably, but not yet.
If you're wondering whether any new SARS-like virus killed people in the Middle East over the long American holiday weekend, the answer is yes. The coronavirus, only discovered by researchers in September, is the confirmed cause of death for victims in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, while another case is being treated in Britain. The number of known cases doubled on Friday, so be careful out there, when you're breathing.
"Every pandemic begins small. Early indicators can be subtle and ambiguous. When the Next Big One arrives, spreading across oceans and continents like the sweep of nightfall, causing illness and fear, killing thousands or maybe millions of people, it will be signaled first by quiet, puzzling reports from faraway places — reports to which disease scientists and public health officials, but few of the rest of us, pay close attention. Such reports have been coming in recent months from two countries, China and Saudi Arabia."
"H7N9 bird flu is considered a low pathogenic strain that cannot easily be contracted by humans," the AP reports from Beijing. Well that would be very comforting for humans (if not for birds), except for the sad fact that the wire story is about the first two humans known to be killed by H7N9. Another infected human is in critical condition.
But it's supposedly a low-level virus and not the SARS kind of crazy—that virus jumped to humans from a weird kind of wildcat cruelly captured and then kept in cages to sell to bad people at markets. SARS eventually killed 775 of the 8,000 infected during that [...]
"France has reported the country's first case of a SARS-like virus that has so far killed 18 people, mostly in Saudi Arabia…. While it has been deadliest in Saudi Arabia, where 11 people have been killed by the virus, other cases have been reported in Jordan, Germany, Britain and now France."
"Saudi Arabia has rejected accusations that it is covering up details of a deadly new SARS-like virus, which has recently been shown to be capable of spreading from person to person."
