increasing but slowly here on the world ometer website seventy five thousand

seven hundred and thirty total deaths 2128 recovered sixteen thousand if we

look at the active cases in the close cases you can see that the number of

recovered has gone up slightly and seems to be doing that on a daily basis if we

look at the total worldwide cases you can see here that they are dwindling

overall but in looking at the cases that are outside of china we can see that

they continue to increase in terms of the number of deaths unfortunately those

continue to be increasing pretty much at a linear rate want to update you on the

situation with the Diamond Princess cruise ship that's docked outside of

Japan there was a statement put out by the CDC commending the Government of

Japan for the fact that they quarantine patients but there's been a lot of

international criticism of how Japan actually handled this and there's been

an intervention and basically the consensus if you read between the lines

is that this did not work very well there's currently more than a hundred US

citizens either on board the diamond princess or in hospitals in Japan and

they've been placed under the restrictions and they're saying that

they will be required to wait 14 days before coming home before they're

permitted to come on board flights however if an individual does make it to

the United States before that 14-day period ends they will be subject to a

mandatory quarantine until they completed that 14-day period so the CDC

is coming out with that statement and they want to make sure that everyone's

aware that they are taking this seriously I also want to quickly

highlight a letter that was submitted to the New England Journal of Medicine

dated yesterday February 19 it was an interesting look at about 18 patients

nine men and nine women meeting 59 years of age and what they did was they looked

at viral loads in the upper respiratory tract to see what they were based on

when the symptoms began and now these were people from Wuhan and

all of them except for one were symptomatic there was one person that

was asymptomatic and we'll talk about that in just a second

but you can see here the graphs of the CT value which is basically the viral

load and on the x-axis here is the number of days since the onset of

symptoms zero being here on the far left and what you can basically see is that

the viral load was quite high in the very early days of the symptoms and then

tapers off almost all of them being undetectable here towards 14 days now

please don't confuse these days as the incubation period this has nothing to do

with the incubation period this has to do with how long the symptoms last once

you get the symptoms an incubation period has to do with how long it is

between infection and the onset of symptoms the other thing to notice here

at the bottom is may be difficult to see but in terms of throat swabs versus

nasal swabs there was a higher viral count in the nasal swabs in general than

there was in the throat swabs meaning that this virus tends to potentially

congregate in the upper Airways there was one patient that was tested and was

asymptomatic and they say here that the viral load that was detected in the

asymptomatic patient was similar to that in the symptomatic patients which

suggests that the transmission potential of asymptomatic or minimally cyntha

matic patients and this is confirming what we had discussed earlier at the

beginning of this outbreak that potentially can be spread by

asymptomatic individuals and we will put a link in the description below to this

article as well as the CDC article another article that was submitted on

the same day yesterday was a perspective that was written by a number of

physicians and epidemiologists on their perspective of defining the epidemiology

of kovat 19 and how more studies are needed one of the interesting aspects

that they mention here is they may need to do testing in people that may not

meet the current definitions which is someone who has traveled from that

particular area of China and has symptoms and they say here a key point

of these recommendations is that viral testing should not be used only for

clinical CAIR I think that's an interesting point

if we really want to find out what the scope is of the infection especially in

China that there's gonna have to be a lot of people who are asymptomatic Lee

tested to see whether or not they had the virus at some point anyway I leave

that perspective there for your consideration in future updates we'll

plan on tackling the molecular biology of corona virus and contrast that and

compared to other viruses and that might give us a little bit of information

about what this virus likes to do please join us at make cram comm for our course

on the corona virus also multiple other courses thanks for joining us