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 staff in Guangdong province. Groups initiated contact tracing and ultimately found that the germ liable for the sicknesses had been circulating since a affected person fell unwell Nov. 16, 2002.
These early circumstances in November have been in “meals handlers” — those that both labored as cooks in eating places or as distributors at “moist markets,” the place reside animals, resembling poultry and more-exotic animals like civet cats and raccoon canines, have been held in crowded situations.
By the point Chinese language illness investigators realized an outbreak may be unfolding, the illness had already been circulating for 2 months and had unfold to well being care staff.
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 finally acquired the illness himself and died that very same month.
By March 12, the WHO had issued an alert a couple of extreme type of pneumonia of unknown origin in individuals 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, that they had 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 individuals, 774 of whom died. The illness’s case-fatality fee was estimated to be round 9.6%.
In early 2004, SARS briefly flared up once more, however its unfold was shortly squelched by 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 canines offered at markets. The subsequent yr, scientists proposed that horseshoe bats have 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 dwelling in distant caves in China’s Yunnan province. The caves have been only a mile away from villages.
“The chance of spillover into individuals and emergence of a illness just like SARS is feasible,” authors warned of their paper on the time.
The SARS epidemic, as scary because it was on the time, was finally only a gown rehearsal for the COVID-19 pandemic that swept throughout the globe from March 2020 to Might 2023, after early circumstances began to emerge in November 2019. The 2 viruses belong to the identical basic household of coronaviruses and certain 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 example, 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 accumulate lab outcomes. After the SARS epidemic, China shortly carried out a radical contact-tracing and disease-surveillance system.
That may show essential when SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, emerged in China. The nation logged lots of of 1000’s of circumstances of infections in the course of the first wave, which resulted in China by mid-February — just some 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 throughout 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 have been seen. And SARS had no particular therapy, whereas by mid-March 2020, vaccines towards the newly recognized virus have been in medical trials, due to mRNA know-how that had been within the works for many years.
Different classes the world might have taken from SARS have been solely partially realized. 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, advised Nature Information that the discovering “reinforces the notion that we must always not disturb wildlife habitats and by no means put wild animals into markets.” He advised Nature Information that respecting nature “is the way in which to keep away from the hurt of rising infections.” But the observe continued.
In some methods, the SARS epidemic additionally gave public well being businesses a false sense of safety. SARS and associated coronavirus illnesses, resembling Center East respiratory syndrome (MERS), have been a lot deadlier than SARS-CoV-2 but in addition a lot simpler to comprise. Outbreaks have been comparatively straightforward to management utilizing contact tracing and different public well being measures, relatively 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 individuals have been significantly unwell, whereas SARS-CoV-2 was simply transmitted from the early phases of illness, generally even earlier than signs emerged.
