Moore provides perspective on Coronavirus as World Health Organisation provides update

Jeff Green | Mar 04, 2020

While efforts to keep the outbreak of SARS from the general population were successful, that will not be possible with COVID-19, according to Kieran Moore, the Medical Officer of Health in Kingston Frontenac, Lennox and Addington.

SARS was kept to just 8,000 cases worldwide and eventually eliminated from humans. But with 10 times as many cases and the virus spreading rapidly in countries like Iran and Italy, Moore said doing the same for COVID-19 is now impossible.

At a meeting last Wednesday (February 26) Moore also pointed out that although COVID-19 had killed almost 2,900 people globally at that point (that number is now higher than 3,100) the flu kills 650,000 people annually.

The mortality rate for COVID-19 is much higher however than flu however, about 3% globally, and because the virus is so new there are no known treatments or vaccines.

He projects that over time COVID-19 will become like the four other coronaviruses that circulate annually in the winter season and are known collectively as the common cold.

“Everyone is susceptible because we don’t have any population immunity, so it will have a very high attack rate over the next several years before settling into a normal seasonal cycle,” he said.

This week, World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus came out with some further information about the similarities and differences between the flu and COVID-19, based on what has been learned thus far.

He said that both cause respiratory disease and spread the same way, via small droplets of fluid from the nose and mouth of someone who is sick.

However, the flu seems to be more efficient in the way it spreads, since it can be transmitted by people who do not yet have symptoms. COVID-19, from information gathered in China, only spreads from people who already have symptoms, making it easier to contain.

COVID-19, it appears, is over 3 times as deadly as the flu. The death rate is 3.4% for those infected with Covid-19, and less than 1% of those infected with the flu die from it.

COIVID-19 is also so new that there are no vaccines or treatments for it, even though there are more than 20 vaccines under development already.

Finally, while the flu is so widespread that there is no such thing as containment, it is still possible to contain COVID-19.

“We don’t do contact tracing for seasonal flu – but countries should do it for COVID-19, because it will prevent infections and save lives. Containment is possible,” Ghebreyesus said in a statement posted on the WHO website this week.

The final point that he made was that a concerted effort needs to be made to make sure that health care workers have the necessary equipment, including 89 million medical masks, to stay safe and fight the disease.

As of Tuesday, March 2^nd, there were 33 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Canada, including 20 in Ontario and 12 in British Columbia. There were none in the Kingston-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington region, however.

KFL&A Public Health says it will notify the public if and when a case is identified.