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Coronaviruses are a type of virus they're called RNA viruses and they can
infect both humans and animals. So there are four human coronaviruses that
circulate each year in people they usually have an uptick in the winter
months particularly in regions like the United States and they cause between 10
and 30% of upper respiratory tract infections in adults. They're very
similar to the common cold and they don't tend to cause severe disease. So
far the reports that we've had from Wuhan are that people are presenting
with a pneumonia, so basically what that means is they're having a bad cough,
shortness of breath, sometimes they go on to develop respiratory failure. They
can't breathe on their own and then in some cases die from that. Most of the
cases have also reported a fever. We don't know a whole lot about how the
virus is spread, we're assuming that it came from an animal but we don't know
which one and then came into the human population that way. There's now clear
evidence that it's also being transmitted from person to person which
is new in the past week. How quickly things are spreading and whether that
person-to-person transmission will continue and sustain a major outbreak we
don't know the answer to those questions. There's no treatment or vaccine for any
of the coronaviruses that are in humans even the typical ones that we see all
the time that caused common cold symptoms. The the risk of obtaining this
virus in the U.S. is so low unless you've traveled to Wuhan. Here at Penn
State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center we're always prepared for unusual
and concerning infectious diseases. We've been preparing for this ever since the
Ebola outbreak in 2014 and we have plans in place in case we would have a case of
this virus here. In the United States the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention is our first line about tracking and obtaining
information on this new virus they maintain a very nice website that gives
updated information about the cases that they're seeing in Wuhan, risk to other
areas in the world, what to do if you need to travel and what to do if you
have symptoms.
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