Profile of a killer: Unraveling the deadly new coronavirus
This undated electron microscope image made available by the U.S. National Institutes of Health in February 2020 shows the Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP, NIAID-RMLSeven months after the first patients were hospitalized in China battling an infection doctors had never seen before, the world's scientists and citizens have reached an unsettling crossroads.
COVID-19 was not even on the world's radar in November. But it has caused economic upheaval echoing the Great Depression, while claiming more than 570,000 lives. In the U.S. alone, the virus has already killed more Americans than died fighting in the First World War. "There's a lot we don't know. But I think it's absolutely certain we're going to be adapting to a new way of life. That's the reality."The new coronavirus is roughly 1,000 times narrower than a human hair. But scrutinized through an electron scope, it is clear this enemy is well-armed.
"Coronaviruses fit into the standard evolutionary paradigm extremely well, which is if you've had some innovation, you get into some new environment ... you get into a human and you do well, you're going to proliferate," Marshall said. Even early on it was clear this virus posed a major threat, he said. Human immune systems had never encountered it. And unlike Zika, whose spread can be controlled by targeting mosquitoes, or AIDS, which most often requires sexual contact, the new virus is readily transmitted through air.
Now, with more than 100,000 commercials flights a day ferrying tourists, business travellers and students around the globe, the new virus spread rapidly and virtually invisibly, said medical historian Mark Honigsbaum, author of "The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria and Hubris." But genetic analysis of samples taken from New York patients showed most of the virus present arrived from Europe instead, and took root in February -- well before anyone thought about quarantining after a trip to Madrid, London or Paris.Since February, when Dr. Daniel Griffin began treating patients suspected of having COVID-19, he's cared for more than 1,000 people with the disease, first noted for attacking the lungs. But the infection certainly does not stop there.
The thickened walls "were everywhere," preventing the lungs from sustaining the rest of the body, said Mukhopadhyay, of Ohio's Cleveland Clinic. Kidneys and livers fail in some patients and blood clots puts limbs at risk of amputation. Some patients hallucinate or have trouble maintaining balance. Some get a treatable paralysis in arms or legs. Many have diarrhea, but often don't mention it until Griffin asks.Initially, doctors often put patients on ventilators if their blood oxygen levels dropped. But death rates were so high they now try other strategies first, like turning patients on their stomachs, which can help them breathe.
"Step one is understanding and step two is fixing. There is no other way," said one of the project's leaders, Jean-Laurent Casanova, of The Rockefeller University in New York. He is paid by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which also helps fund The Associated Press Health and Science Department. These aren't just academic questions. Answers will help in assessing the risks of reopening schools. And they could eventually lead to ways to help make older people resistant to the disease.
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