Should we really worry about the 2019-NCoV coronavirus? While three cases have been identified in France, two in Paris and one in Paris, the question of its virulence and mortality is at the heart of all questions.
This virus, whose epicenter would be a market in Wuhan in China, seems to be a new type of coronavirus, a family with at least seven viruses identified. They can cause mild illnesses in humans, like a cold, but also other more serious ones like SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), which caused several hundred deaths in 2002-2003.
"If you are healthy, you stay standing"
As Jean-Claude Manuguerra, the head of the emergency biological intervention unit at the Institut Pasteur, explained to us, the profile of the deceased is above all a case of "elderly patients suffering from comorbidities (diseases that accompany them) others) or younger but sick, immunocompromised. "
A virus, he sums up, "it's like a slap. If you are in good health, you will remain standing otherwise it will knock you down ”.
To find out more, we compared the 2019 coronavirus-NCoV figures to the previous major coronavirus epidemics, Sras and Mers.
Since its appearance in 2002-2003, the first one has killed 774 people for more than 8000 cases of recorded infections, as recalled by the Journal of medical virology in an article which has just been published. Or a mortality rate of 9.6%.
Regarding the Mers-CoV that appeared in 2009 in the Middle East, the mortality rate was over 30%. It would have made 858 victims out of 2494 identified cases. For comparison, seasonal flu stagnates around a mortality rate of 0.1% in France.
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For now, the 2019-NCoV therefore seems less deadly than its cousins, if we are to believe the figures advanced by the Chinese authorities. In its last declaration dated January 23, the WHO mentions "a proportion of deaths among the cases reported so far of 4% (17 out of 557)".
Globally, the latest report this Saturday morning, 1354 contaminations and 41 deaths (all in China), which gives a death rate of 3.02%.
A high frequency of benign forms
How will the virus evolve or mutate? Hard to say at the moment. According to Santé Publique France, which cites a Eurosurveillance study, "the most recent epidemiological data suggest an increased person-to-person transmission compared to the start of the epidemic, compatible with better adaptation of the virus to humans. These same data are in favor of a high frequency of benign forms among all people infected with this virus ”. In summary: more transmissions but fewer severe cases.
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In a very detailed study published this Friday on the scientific journal The Lancet, doctors from Wuhan hospital analyzed the situation of 41 patients with nCoV-2019, hospitalized in the city at the start of the epidemic between mid-December and January 2. Result: three out of four patients were men and a third had a pre-existing pathology, be it diabetes, hypertension or cardiovascular disease. 32 patients had been admitted to intensive care and in the end, six died.
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