QUICK FACTS
Milestone: First particular person contaminated with SARS
Date: Nov. 16, 2002
The place: Foshan, China
Who: A meals handler
In January 2003, epidemiologists in China recognized two circumstances of “atypical pneumonia” in sufferers who had visited well being care employees in Guangdong province. Groups initiated contact tracing and finally found that the germ accountable for the sicknesses had been circulating since a affected person fell ailing Nov. 16, 2002.
These early circumstances in November had been in “meals handlers” — those that both labored as cooks in eating places or as distributors at “moist markets,” the place stay animals, similar to poultry and more-exotic animals like civet cats and raccoon canine, had been held in crowded circumstances.
By the point Chinese language illness investigators realized an outbreak could be unfolding, the illness had already been circulating for 2 months and had unfold to well being care employees.
The illness reached Hong Kong in February after which exploded when a nephrologist from southern China traveled to the area for a marriage on Feb. 21, 2003. He was unwell throughout his journey and later died of the illness.
In March, a case investigator for the World Well being Group (WHO), Dr. Carlo Urbani, got here to analyze a case noticed in a businessman who had traveled to Hong Kong earlier than arriving in Hanoi, Vietnam, and being hospitalized there. Urbani in the end acquired the illness himself and died that very same month.
By March 12, the WHO had issued an alert a few extreme type of pneumonia of unknown origin in folks from China, Hong Kong and Vietnam. By March 15, the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention (CDC) had formally named the illness extreme acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and by March 24, they’d recognized a novel coronavirus because the trigger.
By that point, the outbreak had neared its peak. The pandemic lasted for months, unfold to twenty-eight international locations past China —with 29 circumstances within the U.S. — and affected greater than 8,000 folks, 774 of whom died. The illness’s case-fatality charge was estimated to be round 9.6%.
In early 2004, SARS briefly flared up once more, however its unfold was shortly squelched by way of an aggressive and fast contact-tracing-and-containment technique.
That second flare-up enabled scientists to hint the SARS virus to palm civets and raccoon canine offered at markets. The subsequent yr, scientists proposed that horseshoe bats had been the pathogen’s authentic animal host, but it surely wasn’t till 2017 that researchers discovered the smoking gun: bats carrying a wealthy pool of SARS-like viruses residing in distant caves in China’s Yunnan province. The caves had been only a mile away from villages.
“The danger of spillover into folks and emergence of a illness much like SARS is feasible,” authors warned of their paper on the time.
The SARS epidemic, as scary because it was on the time, was in the end only a costume rehearsal for the COVID-19 pandemic that swept throughout the globe from March 2020 to Could 2023, after early circumstances began to emerge in November 2019. The 2 viruses belong to the identical common household of coronaviruses and sure emerged from the same animal host.
Scientists and public well being officers efficiently utilized among the classes of SARS to the COVID pandemic. As an illustration, when SARS first emerged, China had a really rudimentary infectious-disease surveillance system. Whereas they did report circumstances of infectious and food-borne illnesses, communication was by phone name, there was no standardized case reporting system, they usually had no system in place to trace contacts or gather lab outcomes. After the SARS epidemic, China shortly carried out a radical contact-tracing and disease-surveillance system.
That might show essential when SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, emerged in China. The nation logged tons of of 1000’s of circumstances of infections in the course of the first wave, which resulted in China by mid-February — only a few months after investigators first reported a cluster of pneumonia circumstances of unknown trigger in Wuhan. (A draconian lockdown additionally possible helped comprise the virus’s unfold inside the nation.)
Whereas it took months to determine the reason for the SARS pandemic, the SARS-CoV-2 virus was recognized lower than two weeks after the primary circumstances had been seen. And SARS had no particular therapy, whereas by mid-March 2020, vaccines towards the newly recognized virus had been in medical trials, because of mRNA know-how that had been within the works for many years.
Different classes the world may have taken from SARS had been solely partially discovered. In 2017, when the SARS supply was recognized, Dr. Kwok-Yung Yuen, a virologist on the College of Hong Kong who co-discovered the virus, informed Nature Information that the discovering “reinforces the notion that we should always not disturb wildlife habitats and by no means put wild animals into markets.” He informed Nature Information that respecting nature “is the way in which to steer clear of the hurt of rising infections.” But the observe continued.
In some methods, the SARS epidemic additionally gave public well being companies a false sense of safety. SARS and associated coronavirus illnesses, similar to Center East respiratory syndrome (MERS), had been a lot deadlier than SARS-CoV-2 but additionally a lot simpler to comprise. Outbreaks had been comparatively simple to management utilizing contact tracing and different public well being measures, reasonably than requiring the distribution of vaccines.
That is as a result of SARS had a shorter infectious window than COVID-19. It was most infectious in the course of the second week of the sickness, when folks had been critically ailing, whereas SARS-CoV-2 was simply transmitted from the early phases of illness, typically even earlier than signs emerged.
