To Defeat Coronavirus, Win the Containment Battle
New research suggests the usual methods aren’t going to be enough in countries reporting outbreaks of the disease.
The fight goes global.
Photographer: Andreas Solaro/AFP via Getty Images
The coronavirus epidemic keeps defying predictions. In the last few days, significant new outbreaks have been reported in Iran, South Korea and Italy. Authorities in all three nations have locked down cities and restricted travel in an effort to contain it. The total number of confirmed infections globally is now nearly 80,000, and the number of unknown infections may be much larger.
Worryingly, new research suggests that the virus is also far more contagious than initially believed. Early estimates of the basic reproductive number r0 — a key epidemiological figure that reflects the number of new cases, on average, resulting from a single infection in a fully susceptible population — looked to be in the range of 2 to 3. But several new studies of the epidemic's earliest stages have reported significantly larger numbers, from 4 to 7.