Unique epidemiological and clinical features of the emerging 2019 novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID‐19) implicate special control measures

By Yixuan Wang, Yuyi Wang, Yan Chen, Q. Qin. Journal of Medical Virology, 2020

1,450 citations recorded by the source corpus.

By 27 February 2020, the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) caused 82 623 confirmed cases and 2858 deaths globally, more than severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) (8273 cases, 775 deaths) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) (1139 cases, 431 deaths) caused in 2003 and 2013, respectively. COVID‐19 has spread to 46 countries internationally. Total fatality rate of COVID‐19 is estimated at 3.46% by far based on published data from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC). Average incubation period of COVID‐19 is around 6.4 days, ranges from 0 to 24 days. The basic reproductive number (R0) of COVID‐19 ranges from 2 to 3.5 at the early phase regardless of different prediction models, which is higher than SARS and MERS. A study from China CDC showed majority of patients (80.9%) were considered asymptomatic or mild pneumonia but released large amounts of viruses at the early phase of infection, which posed enormous challenges for containing the spread of COVID‐19. Nosocomial transmission was another severe problem. A total of 3019 health workers were infected by 12 February 2020, which accounted for 3.83% of total number of infections, and extremely burdened the health system, especially in Wuhan. Limited epidemiological and clinical data suggest that the disease spectrum of COVID‐19 may differ from SARS or MERS. We summarize latest literatures on genetic, epidemiological, and clinical features of COVID‐19 in comparison to SARS and MERS and emphasize special measures on diagnosis and potential interventions. This review will improve our understanding of the unique features of COVID‐19 and enhance our control measures in the future.

Subfields: Infectious Diseases, Neurology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/21e559c48d1d12a1cf72686dc186e3bbd698b997

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Citations in the corpus

• Modelling the COVID-19 epidemic and implementation of population-wide interventions in Italy (2020, background): “According to early Chinese data [11], a large quota of transmissions, both in a nosocomial and in a community setting, occurred through human-to-human contacts with individuals showing no or mild symptoms of the disease.”
• Correlation between weather and Covid-19 pandemic in Jakarta, Indonesia (2020, neutral): “The clinical symptoms of J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f severe and critical patients with covid-19 are likely similar with the clinical symptoms of SARS and MERS (Wang et al., 2020b) .”
• A first case of meningitis/encephalitis associated with SARS-Coronavirus-2 (2020, background): “(Wang et al., 2020a,b) A preliminary report warned that SARS-CoV-2 could have neuroinvasive potential because some patients showed neurologic symptoms such as ciety for Infectious Diseases.”
• Coronavirus Disease 19 (COVID-19): Implications for Clinical Dental Care (2020, background): “These patients should be encouraged to engage in self-quarantine and contact their primary care physician by telephone or email 23 .”
• Mathematical modeling of the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) taking into account the undetected infections. The case of China (2020, positive): “According to the known characteristics of the COVID-19 pandemic, we assume that each person is in one of the following compartments (see [46] ): ”
• Explainable Deep Learning for Pulmonary Disease and Coronavirus COVID-19 Detection from X-rays (2020, neutral): “In more severe cases, often found in subjects already burdened by previous diseases, pneumonia develops, acute renal failure, up to even death [4] , but this new coronavirus presents several unique features [7] .”
• Zoonotic Diseases: Etiology, Impact, and Control (2020, background): “COVID-19 has significantly impacted all sectors of the society including health and education sectors, financial sectors, travel and hospitality sectors, and the sports sector [223].”
• Correlation between climate indicators and COVID-19 pandemic in New York, USA (2020, background): “cough, fever, and difficulty in breathing due to respiratory disorder, and in worst-case scenario COVID-19 causes kidney failure, pneumonia, and even death (Wang et al., 2020).”