 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we are joined by Prabir Prakash to discuss the recent developments in the coronavirus outbreak. So from what it seems the disease is continuing to spread, there are over 17,000 cases which have been reported so far, around 360 deaths. The first casualty outside of China has also been reported in the Philippines and three cases of confirmed coronavirus have so far been reported in India. But Prabir, before we talk about all of that, can you tell us about the virus itself from the studies that have been done? What do we know about its origins, about its development, etc? First thing is to call it coronavirus itself is a problem because it's only one variant of a coronavirus because even the common cold as you know, it's a coronavirus. So this is 2019 novel coronavirus or in short the novel coronavirus which is, I would have thought that if we had called it the Wuhan virus, perhaps you would have identified it more clearly. Otherwise it's a feeling if somebody says that I've got a coronavirus infection, people immediately put him in quarantine. What is got is really a common cold. So that is one part. I think when you talk about the coronavirus itself, novel coronavirus, this particular variant of it, there are two parts to it. One is it still seems to show an infection rate which is quite high. And one of the reasons which now we know is because it incubates in the body for about seven to days to 14 days, once two weeks. And it is asymptomatic in this period. And even when it is asymptomatic, you don't see the symptoms, it can still infect others. So to identify such people is the difficulty. And you can do it only when you see a particular person who has been infected, show symptoms, test positive, and then you trace back the contacts and then try and see how to also monitor them, put them in quarantine and so on. So it's a secondary level of contact that you can really start tracing and isolating. From that you may be able to control the spread of the disease. So one of the things has been this new feature rather something which is not obvious and something that doesn't happen with other such viruses is that even when you don't show symptoms, you can infect other people. As you see the flu virus for instance, when it only shows symptoms, only then you are really infecting others. So I think this has taken the authority some time to realize and also put in place things. The second reason why you saw a sudden jump in the numbers is also the fact that the diagnostic kits were not available that quickly. And these diagnostic kits needed development because we hadn't seen the virus earlier. So the fact that now the diagnostic kits are available in large numbers, Chinese really have acted fast on that, means that now a lot more detections are taking place even if we have not shown the symptoms. So I think this is the reason you see a sudden rise in the number of cases and then stabilization. The third thing I think about it is of course the quarantine measures, how good they are, how much they're holding, how much it has already spread. It had already spread before you quarantined the people. The entire province of Hubei seems to be under quarantine. Wuhan people cannot get out of Wuhan for quite some time now. And China has followed it up with really very large scale attempts to get people not to move around too much unless it's absolutely essential. So they're really attacking the transmissibility route which is people to people transmissions. I think these are all the elements that have to be looked at. And yes, this coronavirus, this variant of the coronavirus, it seems now a higher transmission rate but a lower mortality. So as of now, the number of people who are coming out as cured are now beginning to rise and the number of deaths are holding at the moment. And it does seem also that its fatality rate is lower than for instance the SARS virus or some of the other MERS virus for instance. So yes, more infections, the more infections but less lethal. That's what the verdict still is which is what we had discussed earlier. So this would be the first analysis that we can reach fairly conclusively about how this disease is behaving and what the future might therefore be for us. Praveer, where are we now also in terms of development of a vaccination for this? Well, you know the first important issue is how quickly the genome sequence has been done. As you know there's been a Lancet study which has come out. The Chinese have made the genome sequence public and has put also a number of such sequences of patients who have been infected. Their genome sequence of the infection has been made public. So last that I looked of I think about 34 or 35 such sequences made public by the time you are in discussion probably it exceeds 50. Now what it allows you therefore is to look at all the variations that are there and trace back what the original virus would have been when it would have jumped from a certain species and come into the human population. After that it is a human-to-human transmission. It looks like after that it is not spread from other animals but it has really been from a particular jump and then human-to-human transmission. This is what we seem to see from the genome sequences. It also shows that before it became apparent in the human population which is somewhere in December this probably had started somewhere in November. So the first such leap probably took place. If you do the genome sequence and look at what would be the original ancestor virus that original parent as it were then probably this was in November. So all of this information is now available in public domain. This is allowed because this genome sequence has been made public. It allows us to look at the possibility of a vaccine. Now there are two kinds of vaccines which take place. One is you use the old method which is really take a snippet of the virus itself or you take some you know more inert form of the virus really be the same thing in some sense and get then the reaction to that that would be the then used as a vaccine. That means you take a snippet let the body then react to it or take a more weakened virus let the body react to it and then that provides you the immunity for actual infections. Now this takes considerably longer time to do and this normally would be the earliest is four months the actual rate till date the fastest we have ever developed six months. So this is a traditional vaccination method then you have to go for clinical trials and then you have to put it into mass production. So this normally happens after the disease had really run its course and you already have developed what would be called herd immunity enough people are infected so their new infections don't take place. Now this time we have another instrument or another weapon in our armory which is we have the ability to use what are called messenger RNAs which gives signals to the body to produce certain proteins and those proteins then would be such that the body's immune reaction against it would also give us the equivalence of a vaccine in fact this is the mRNA vaccine. So therefore body is body makes the protein which then the body's immune system reacts to and that stops other future infections. This mRNA vaccines messenger RNA vaccines it seems that we have the platforms available so if we have the genome sequence we have the mRNA which we can derive out of it then we can put it into this platform and generate the vaccine rather quickly but rather quickly would also be in something like 30 to 40 days and then of course you'd have to do the clinical trials to see the effectiveness of this and then of course it should be it has to be mass produced but the process is such that this kind of systems are already in place and all we need is a mRNA template so to say which can create this kind of vaccine and now to my knowledge about four such initiatives are taking place one of course out of China which has a biotech company which is producing the mRNA vaccine is slated to produce the mRNA vaccine and there are three other companies which are also in this task I think in this case more the many are it's not competition because we'll have to see in field trials which works best so if you have four such candidates or five such candidates or six such candidates it's all the better for us we can test it out in different places and then choose which ones are the most effective. So I think that is positive signs yes we can do it much faster than you have ever done for the first time it might be possible to develop a vaccine while the epidemic is still developing so I think that's a positive sign but the same time we will probably not see the vaccine before three to four months so that's the also the time period of that. So right now the measures that have to be taken are essentially quarantining and attacking the transmissibility route which if it is more than one the epidemic will spread if it is less than one the epidemic will slowly die out and that's where we are at the moment. And so despite what seems like a very rapid response by the on the part of the Chinese government we know that they managed to construct a thousand bed hospital in a matter of 10 days there's still some criticism that the Chinese failed to recognize or they were slow to recognize that the outbreak has begun so can you tell us about that you know this I think is a part of the larger propaganda war in which the Chinese are will be attacked for whatever they do if for instance they had taken action and the epidemic hadn't occurred then they would have been abused for being too authoritarian now they've been accused they didn't recognize it on the first day they got one infection I think it's quite absurd because really if you look at the response of the Americans on swine flu if you look at any other part of the world what the reaction has been as a director general of world health organization said the Chinese response have been not only exemplary this is not a reaction that any country can perhaps do anywhere in the world they have shut down one province they have quarantined the town of 11 million people they have found the that they have genome sequenced it within a very short period they've made the genome sequence available publicly so all of these would seem to indicate that they have responded really rapidly of course you can always say retrospectively they should have done better and yes even the Chinese should have competition from the Chinese that how they can better this response but I don't think we have seen this kind of response to any epidemic and if you see the periodic flu epidemics that take place even now the world loses 700,000 600,000 people every year due to flu because flu ultimately converts to pneumonia and pneumonia as you know is in effect and flu is also coronavirus so it's not that this is not happening continuously so I think this reaction of the Chinese has been as the director general of WHO said it's been exemplary I really do not look at it only as the Chinese government's reaction but also the people's reaction because people have by and large followed all the steps that the government has said wear masks avoid public places travel only when you must go into places where you meet others only when you must wash your hands as frequently as possible this has been not only followed by and large but there is a complete belief in the government that yes the government is taking the right steps and we must cooperate with it and a sense that yes if they do it then they will be able to address the epidemic as yet I see that the Chinese people have been completely supportive of the government I do not think that this kind of response would have taken place anywhere else it's also the credibility of the Chinese state the people still believe the Chinese states really is a state of its people I think that kind of social sanction existed very few countries in the world today so I would say that I would endorse what the WHO has said that this is very unusual in terms of response I would also say that the WHO has said that trade the travel links with China doesn't need to be broken and all we have to do is to see the Hubei province and the Wuhan that epidemic is tackled the rest of the world there is no need to do ban all traffic and some people are already suggesting I will also say there is a lot of hysteria which is being built up which is anti-Chinese a lot of this is simply racist and that's that is not unusual in a world where race or ethnic identities are still there sometimes nationalist sometimes is racist and the yellow peril is still a motif that seems to come back again and again in the west particularly so I would take this all with a pinch of salt but I will also say there is one other element which is much more mischievous which is to argue that Wuhan was a center of biological research in China so this is a biological weapon which has got loose this is a periodic shall we say campaign which is launched again any new infection that comes up in the belief that any novel infection virus anything which is novel must be a human creation it cannot happen in nature but the reality is of course there is a continuous shall we say biological competition between human species and the viruses and the bacteria it's not that we are only evolving they are also evolving and they evolve obviously much faster than we do and we have to accept that periodically there will be normal diseases which will break out which we have not seen AIDS was an example and it took us a long time for us to recognize there was even an AIDS epidemic in fact we denied there was an AIDS epidemic for quite some time and the US in fact argued this was only a homosexual or a black disease it didn't really affect anybody else till it became apparent it did so this battle between the virus the bacteria and us is a continuous one and in this case I think the fact that science has reached a level we can decipher the genome of the virus so quickly look at all of this and quickly develop instruments to identify as well as possibly in the future vaccinate the people is one major development in this particular case we are also testing a lot of antiretrovirals and other drugs to see if they can help addressing the sea distance of the infection and some of the anti AIDS drugs anti what would be called retrovirals are also being pulled into this war and it does seem that some of them will be will be partially effective and even if it is partially effective it means it can slow down the infection it will give the people some breathing space in order to recover the body has to recover and you see the most of the people who have been affected is what happens in all coronavirus infection including the flu it's those whose immune systems are compromised or those who are old who then can suffer increased intensity of the infection and also mortality and I think all of those things this time has to be seen and how this disease can now be modulated and hopefully the Chinese government and the institutions of science in China as well what the people are doing will help you hopefully beat this epidemic in a certain period of time but yes still early days still incubation we do not know how many people are infected and infecting others have we reached the crest and is it now going to slowly die down these are things yet to be need to watch so thank you probably for talking to us today and this is all the time we have keep watching news click