welcome to another MedCram SARS-CoV-2 COVID-19 update we had a good
conference but it's good to be back what we're gonna talk about in this update
are the new cases in South Korea the new criteria once again for the diagnosis a
lot of you have been asking questions about infants and mother infant
transmission and we'll talk about that we've got some data there that we'll
talk about and also getting back to the source of where this virus actually came
from we'll talk about some data there as well
once again really appreciate all of the comments all of the questions and there
are very good questions that you all have I'm keeping track of those as we go
so here is again the map total deaths well over 2000 total recovered is around
18,000 and we can see the graphs here if we go to the world ometer they have
similar numbers we've already talked about how these numbers are under
estimating this we don't know how much it's under estimating but we may have a
better understanding once we start doing serologies because that will test for
antibodies to the virus and that will tell us a much better distribution of
the population has seen this virus we'll talk more about that as we go active
cases and close cases close cases 20 thousand looks like 89 percent of those
have recovered in the active cases they're saying that 40 3888 are in mild
condition we just don't know where we're going with those at this point if we
click on the graph for those active cases you can see that they're actually
decreasing according to the statistics coming out of China we've got here daily
new cases and remember we had this big jump on February 12th we'll talk more
about that since that time it's been decreasing total cases outside of China
are still continuing to increase and that is of course a concern if you
exclude mainland China in the daily cases we're still seeing some of the
highest new case reports here most recently and that brings us to this BBC
news article talking about the South Korean
sect that was identified recently as a hotbed about 30 of the 53 cases
identified today in South Korea came from the city of Daegu and was tied to
one 61 year old woman who tested positive for the virus
earlier in the week she belonged to this religious organization and is probably
responsible for at least the 30 of those cases and so they are undergoing
quarantine we'll put a link in the description below to this article also
in the news we'll talk about the diamond princess ship to people from Japan who
were infected on that ship have died they were both in their 80s let's move
to this confusion mounds over China's counting methods as coronavirus numbers
swing wildly and this is interesting because as it mentions here in the
article we have Hubei Province reporting 349 cases that's in the entire province
and yet at the same time in the capital of that province Wuhan there's 605 new
cases all by itself so what is it that is going on here it seems as though the
provincial government is not confirming cases unless they actually have the
genetic testing whereas what's going on in the city of Wuhan is they're still
going by the newly updated criteria which is allowing physicians to diagnose
even though they don't have genetic testing they still have these scans
which show pneumonia in these patients with clinical signs and that make it
suspicious if you read the article it does go in to the fact that there was a
sudden spike in the case numbers On February 12 which we discussed in a
previous video was most likely due to the relaxing of the very stringent
diagnostic criteria it's not a coincidence that the new officials from
the Chinese Communist Party took over on the 12th or around that time and there's
been this thought that perhaps they wanted to clear the slate get as many
diagnoses on the books as possible and there's this quote from the article
which basically states that the party boss of Wuhan
was saying if there's one more case where to be found in a household that
that districts party secretary would be held accountable and that's the show
that there is probably a real push to try to get the numbers down now that the
new policy makers in Wuhan have taken over anyway we will put a link to this
article also in the description below so you can read it for yourself okay let's
move to an article that was published back on the 14th of February in JAMA
which is the Journal of the American Medical Association titled novel
coronavirus infection in hospitalized infants under one year of age in China
so here the N number was only nine patients but it's because they're not
really seeing a lot of kovat 19 infections in these patients so out of
75,000 they've only got about a hundred or so on the books in the pediatric
population so that could be because maybe the pediatric population isn't as
susceptible and when they looked at these nine first of all they found that
only four of them had fever only two of them had upper respiratory infection
symptoms one of them was completely asymptomatic and they were tested
because the family had tested positive they wanted to make sure in terms of the
number of infants with severe complications or on the ventilator in
the ICU the number was zero again we'll leave a link to this article in the
description as well so you can read it for yourself so with all of these
infections going on the CDC has put out some answers to questions about pregnant
women one of the questions was our infants born to mothers at increased
risk and so that's an interesting question it looks as though based on
limited case reports adverse infant outcomes or preterm birth have been
reported among infants born to mothers positive for kovin 19 during pregnancy
however it is not clear that these outcomes were related to maternal
infection and at this time the risk of adverse infant outcomes is not known
here's another question can pregnant women with Kovan 19 pass the virus to
their fetus or newborn and it seems as though in limited recent case series
of the infant's have tested positive for the virus that caused cough in nineteen
and additionally when they looked at the amniotic fluid they were not able to
find a virus in there either of course when the birthing process occurs there
can be a mixing of bodily fluids and that could be the source of infection in
an infants after the birthing process with Zika virus that can cross the
placenta it appears as though corona virus does not at this point well that
brings us to one of the last stories that we want to talk about this was a
really kind of concerning article that I saw here on NPR new research bats Harbor
hundreds of corona viruses and spill overs aren't rare we'll put a link to
this in the description below so what is this here you can see these researchers
actually taking samples of saliva from bats and actually taking a rectal sample
and when were they doing this not recently but three years ago when they
were doing studies because of the SARS outbreak from 2002 which was linked to
bats so this story talks about a organization called eco health alliance
that was going out in Borneo but they also did research in China at the time
and they collected specimens from bats and what they found was actually quite
disturbing they found that there were over 400 different species of corona
viruses in these bats now remember these bats live in caves they live together
and they commune together and so there's a lot of crossover that can occur the
previous thinking on this was that these corona viruses could not really jump
into humans because they had to go into something that was closer to humans or
that had to get a mutation so it could buy into human receptors for instance
the ACE 2 receptor that we see in SARS and actually the virus that causes Kovan
19 they thought that spill overs were rare what they found was concerning
because they looked at these viruses and they found that these things could
infect human cells in fact they took some of these corona viruses that they
found in these bats they put him on a petri dish that
aligned with human cells and the coronaviruses at least some of them
could infect these human cells without a problem so then they decided to go visit
some humans that were living around these caves where the bats were to see
if in fact these coronaviruses had already jumped into humans and when they
went into the caves to do the research they found water bottles around the
caves because in the summertime it's kind of cool and humans tend to go in
there and also the people that were living in the area said oh yeah bats fly
into the house and sometimes we kill them so there is this crossover well
when they did test the humans for signs symptoms genetic traces of these
coronaviruses they found them and so they concluded that spillover does occur
of course this is kind of in a rural area and so this may not explode into an
epidemic because it's not in a city center and the symptoms may be very mild
okay now fast-forward here three or four years later of course when this new
corona virus breaks out what they did was they took the RNA from this corona
virus and they compared it to the four hundred different strains of the corona
virus that they identified earlier in China and says here they found an
extremely close match they said in fact that a viral tax ominous would probably
call it the same virus species they say that suggests that this current outbreak
which has infected tens of thousands of people could have come here's the word
could have come directly from bats there is a larger take away he says that these
bats ours related coronaviruses are actively spilling over into the human
population not all of them will spark a deadly pandemic but the more frequent
these spillover is the greater the chances that this could potentially be
happening in future updates we're going to talk about the molecular biology of
corona virus how it infects the cell let's get down to the nitty gritty
compare it to the behavior of other viruses other viruses that have been
brought up in this discussion for instance HIV etc and how is it that
these viruses do different things what is it that they do what are their target
that's we're gonna try to answer thanks for joining us