It’s important to eradicate a new strain of coronavirus before it has the potential to become another influenza that sickens and kills each year, provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said on Friday.
“If we do not take all the measures that we can take right now to make sure that we eradicate this virus from human populations, then we may end up with yet another ongoing endemic infection like influenza that we will have to deal with every year that causes severe illness and some deaths in human populations,” Dr. Bonnie Henry said at a news conference in Vancouver.
Influenza and pneumonia are ranked among the top-10 leading causes of death in Canada, according to the federal government. Each year, it’s estimated that influenza causes at least 12,200 hospitalizations and 3,500 deaths.
Henry said the impact of the current coronavirus outbreak has been small so far, compared with the effects of influenza and many other communicable diseases.
“How the novel coronavirus differs from these other diseases, however, is that it normally circulates only in animals, and has not yet become an established illness in humans,” she said.
If we contain it now, “it may be that we can stop all human-to-human transmission” and push the virus back into the animal population. “And that’s a really important thing,” she said. “We have been successful in doing that with SARS.”
Most of the coronavirus illnesses have been in China, with nearly 11,800 confirmed cases on Friday and 259 deaths. The vast majority have been in Hubei province and its capital, Wuhan, where the first illnesses were detected in December. No deaths have been reported outside China.
Canada had four confirmed cases on Friday, including one case in British Columbia.
The World Health Organization has declared the outbreak a global health emergency.
Henry, who previously served as associate medical officer of health for Toronto Public Health, was the operational lead in 2003 in the response to the SARS outbreak, which killed 44 people in Canada.
Henry said she’s anxious about the novel coronavirus, having lived through SARS, but believes the WHO declaration of a global health emergency provides a chance for public health officials to make a difference in stopping the virus.
“It will be a global challenge to do this and that is what the World Health Organization and all countries are now focusing on,” said Henry. “If that goal is not achieved, it is possible that the novel coronavirus will cause widespread illness on a periodic basis, for example yearly, as influenza and other respiratory illnesses do now.”
If nothing else, novel illnesses are an opportunity to reinforce basic measures for infection control, Henry said.
Coughing into one’s sleeve, for example, became an established practice during SARS, and has been an important strategy to limit transmission of seasonal influenza, she said.
Public-health messages are emphasizing frequent washing of hands with soap and staying at home if you become sick.
