Thailand now theorizes that a cocktail of HIV drugs and flu medicines can treat Wuhan coronavirus patients. This theory was shared to the world after Thailand doctors successfully cured a patient to a full recovery.
The patient treated was 71 years old, the age found to be the most vulnerable to the outbreak. The female patient was treated with a combination of drugs used in HIV and flu treatments. She improved within 48 hours. The test results also changed from positive to negative within two days.
Health experts are somewhat hesitant to say that the combination of drugs is really the cure against coronavirus since Thailand doctors said that the patient who recovered had no traces of the virus in his respiratory system. The virus is in its most fatal when it reached the lungs.
Hospitals in Beijing said they are giving the same combination of drugs to their patients but there are no reports yet of recovery coming from the city.
Meanwhile, the first confirmed death out of China was reported in the Philippines. The 44-year-old man was a Chinese who flew from Wuhan.
To date, there are now more than 160 confirmed cases in 26 countries outside China. Inside the country, confirmed cases now reached 17,205 and deaths of 361.
Germany has just confirmed its 10th case, while new infections were reported in South Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia, Macao, and Hong Kong.
With how the coronavirus is spreading worldwide, health experts said it is likely to become a pandemic, most especially that it continues to spread even with lockdown implemented in China and travel bans worldwide.
To date, there are already 10,000 flights that were canceled from January 31. To be clear, the World Health Organization does not encourage such bans because it will make it more difficult to monitor the activities of people. Also, it will be harder for health experts to track down how the disease evolves and how to create the correct vaccine for it.
On the other hand, one reason the virus is growing to become a pandemic because some carriers are asymptomatic. Some individuals infected by the Wuhan coronavirus can infect others without them exhibiting known symptoms. In this regard, it will only be logical for governments around the world to implement travel bans against foreign nationals traveling from China.
By being asymptomatic, border screening became more difficult. The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control estimated that 75% of those carrying the virus in Europe from China are already in their incubation period upon arrival. Still, asymptomatic carriers are not the major drivers of epidemics in all cases of outbreaks, one of the doctors from the EU CDC said. The real challenge in this Wuhan coronavirus is that it gets transmitted easily like the flu compared to how SARS and MERS are being transmitted.
Meanwhile, the United Staes, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and France continue to evacuate their citizens from China. These countries, as well as other Asian and European nations, have also banned all foreign nationals coming from China.
Canada received 325 requests for departure assistance from Hubei. The country has now scheduled a flight to take Canadian citizens from the province. There are about 543 Canadians in Hubei and a total of 15,219 all over China.
Health experts are direly concerned about the coronavirus reaching Africa where medical facilities remain questionable. More than 1 million Chinese works in the continent in the mining, drilling and engineering projects. At the same time, many Africans are on a work and study program in China as part of a bilateral agreement.
