(February 17 – 24, 2020)
Over 80,000 confirmed coronavirus cases have been registered worldwide as of February 24th 2020, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Almost 78,000 patients diagnosed with COVID-19 are localized in China while the remaining cases have been confirmed in 34 nations across the world. DevelopmentAid has been monitoring the situation since the first days of the coronavirus outbreak in early 2020. In our weekly review published every Tuesday, we keep our readers up-to-date with the most important events in the COVID-19 outbreak evolution.
Since the beginning of February, South America remains the only continent with no confirmed coronavirus cases after one patient was diagnosed in Egypt, adding Africa to the list of regions affected by the coronavirus outbreak.
Almost 28,000 people have recovered from COVID-19 since the outbreak started in January 2020. At the same time, 2,699 deaths have been registered, as of February 25, 2020. According to Ding Xiang Yuan (an online medical social community) there are still over 9,000 severe COVID-19 cases in China.
Between 17 – 24 February, over 8,300 new cases of COVID-19 were confirmed worldwide while over 14,400 patients who had recovered were registered in the same timeframe.
The COVID-19 situation in Italy
The attention of the world media has concentrated on Northern Italy where a sudden outbreak of the coronavirus was recently recorded.
Tarik Jasarevic, spokesperson at the WHO, commented upon the situation in Italy for DevelopmentAid readers, mentioning that the organization is “concerned by the lack of clear epidemiological links in some of the reported cases”.
“As of 24 February (6am Geneva time), there were 132 cases reported in Italy. A rapid increase in cases of laboratory confirmed coronavirus (COVID-19) has been detected in north Italy since 21 February. Two of these patients have reportedly died. Initial investigation has found several clusters of cases in different regions of north Italy, with evidence of local transmission of COVID-19. We are concerned by the lack of clear epidemiological links in some of the reported cases. We are in close contact with the Italian authorities. A joint WHO and ECDC expert team will be arriving on Tuesday, 25 February, to contribute to understanding how the events developed and to support the control and prevention efforts by the Italian authorities”, stated Mr. Jasarevic.
He added that WHO experts will provide support in the areas of clinical management, infection prevention and control, surveillance and risk communication. “At this stage, we need to focus on limiting further human to human transmission. This will also be an important opportunity to learn from the Italian experience, as similar situations may be experienced in other countries in the European region in the near future” added Tarik Jasarevic, WHO.
Development community efforts to tackle the outbreak
In its Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan, drafted at the beginning of February, the WHO called for US$675 million to support the most vulnerable countries against the COVID-19 outbreak. US$61.5 m of this amount is accounted for by WHO’s urgent preparedness and response activities for the period between February to April 2020. So far, the organization has received US$1.2 million. Ireland and Slovakia provided US$515,000 and US$220,000 respectively while Vital Strategies/Resolve to Save Lives, a global public health initiative, provided US$500,000.
According to the WHO website, the list of contributors also includes the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Canada, Czech Republic, European Union, Japan, Norway and the United Kingdom. At the same time, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands and Sweden provided funding to WHO’s Contingency Fund for Emergencies (CFE). The CFE is a critical response mechanism to outbreaks around the world including the new coronavirus (COVID-19) eruption.
On February 24, the European Commission announced new funding worth €232 million to be allocated to different sectors in fighting the COVID-19 outbreak. Of this amount, €114 million will support the World Health Organization (WHO), in particular, the global preparedness and response global plan.
“This intends to boost public health emergency preparedness and response work in countries with weak health systems and limited resilience. Part of this funding is subject to the agreement of the EU budgetary authorities” states the EC communique.
The remaining €115 million from the EC commitment will be allocated to rapid diagnosis and epidemiological surveillance, research related to diagnostics, therapeutic measures and prevention. The EC is going to spend €3 million on repatriation flights for EU citizens from Wuhan, China. The commission had earlier already carried out similar actions to repatriate EU citizens from the affected zones.
Repatriation has been a sensitive issue for some EU neighbors. Violent clashes have been reported in Ukraine on February 21, after 45 Ukrainians and 27 foreign citizens were repatriated from China to a 14-day quarantine location in Ukraine’s Poltava oblast. The police had to use force to unblock the road and disperse the crowd, according to BBC news-reports. As of today, there have been no confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Ukraine.
The most affected categories of people
Reportedly, the virus has affected predominantly the elderly patient category with a relatively low number of children being infected. Asked by DevelopmentAid, Mr. Jasarevic added some precision to this information.
“Current information suggests that the virus can cause mild, flu-like symptoms as well as more severe disease. Patients have a range of symptoms. Based on current data, 81% of cases seem to have mild disease, about 14% appear to progress to severe disease, and some 5% are critical. Chinese authorities report that about 3-4% of people with the disease have died, although the exact case-fatality ratio is still difficult to assess as the denominator (or number of infections including mild) remains unknown. Fatal cases seem so far to be strongly associated with age. We see relatively few cases among children. More research, of course, is needed to understand why”, concluded Jasarevic.
About COVID-2019
Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that are common in many different species of animals including camels, cattle, cats and bats. Rarely, animal coronaviruses can infect people and then spread between them such as was the case with MERS (2012) and SARS (2003). The symptoms of the virus are very similar to those of a common cold – runny nose, headache, cough, sore throat, fever, a general feeling of being unwell. Blood tests are necessary in order to prove the presence of the virus in the organism.
Named by scientists as the “Wuhan seafood market pneumonia virus”, 2019-nCoV is a coronavirus, like MERS and SARs, all of which have their origins in bats. Initial reports show that, in the early stages of the outbreak (early January 2020), many of those infected in Wuhan had some link to a large seafood and live animal market – the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, mainly its western wing where wildlife animals are traded. This suggests that the virus initially affected an animal and subsequently spread to a person in a what a CDC has called “the species barrier jump”.
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