Posted on by Californiacontrarian

Wuhan Flu

From now on I am going to refer the the present outbreak as the “Wuhan flu.” Why? Well basically it is a variety of influenza similar to what we get every year. Obviously, there are some significant differences. The most significant is its ability to spread rapidly, because of two things. First,the RO, (which tells us how many are likely to be infected from a single individual) is above 2.0. In other words it is likely to be easily spread from person to person. Adding to its “spreadability” is the fact that it has a significantly longer incubation period than the typical virus, upwards of two weeks, and so people can spread this infection for a long time before they realize that they are sick.
How does the Wuhan flu measure up with yearly and other more serious past flu epidemics? 
Seasonal influenza is bad enough. It is estimated that kills between 3,600 – 49,000 people in the U.S In a year, and between 250,000 and 500,000 globally.
We know that the present outbreak is not as deadly as the SARS epidemic of 2003, which killed about 10% of the 8,098 confirmed cases of the respiratory illness In 2012. And the Wuhan flu is far less deadly than the 2012 MERS, which killed about 34% of approximately only 2,500 confirmed cases.

In 2009-2010 it was the Swine flu (H1N1), which infected 61 million Americans and killed about 12,000, which included 282 children. To me this is a quandary. Why are children and young adults either less susceptible to the present Wuhan flu, or perhaps, better said, less likely to have a severe form of Wuhan flu? For instance, in China the mortality for those <40 years old was 0.2%, and similarly in South Korea, where in those younger 60 years the mortality was quite low. In other words this Wuhan flu appears to be significantly less severe for those < 60, and even progressively less severe, the younger one is. Why?

Follow me with this logical presumption . . . a large percent of common colds are due to garden variety corona viruses (obviously different strains). Could it be that because young children are “sick, just about all the time with snotty runny noses,” they have a lot of antibodies and thus a relative immunity to the Wuhan strain of the corona virus? If this postulate is true, then I would expect that pre-school and kindergarten teachers would be less likely to get this variety of flu. 

We’ll see.

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