The novel coronavirus is not as contagious as SARS, yet public advice to schools and childcare centres is stronger. This doesn’t mean it’s medically necessary.
Thai health officials await passengers arriving on international flights. All signs point to a global overreaction to this crisis, and therefore to an amplified economic impact.
Rungroj Yongrit/EPA
Ilan Noy, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
The preliminary evidence suggests the Wuhan coronavirus is less deadly than SARS. But with social media, panic can now spread more rapidly and further.
A security guard wears a mask as she keeps watch at arriving passengers at Manila’s international airport in the Philippines on Jan. 23, 2020, as part of efforts to contain the coronavirus.
AP Photo/Aaron Favila
One of the dangers of the new coronavirus is that there is no treatment – and no vaccine. But researchers had already been at work on vaccines for close-related viruses.
Kenyan health workers from port health services screen inbound travelers for temperatures at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.
EPA/Daniel Irungu
There’s no evidence you can spread the Wuhan coronavirus before showing symptoms, but one study suggests it’s possible for children and young people to be infectious without ever having symptoms.
Masks are selling out in Singapore amid concerns about the Wuhan virus.
Ng Sor Luan/EPA
The World Health Organization decided that the coronavirus outbreak in China is not a public health emergency of international concern. At least, not at the moment.
Passengers on a tram in China wear surgical masks to guard against viral infection.
Willie Siau/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos put environmental risks at the top of its agenda, while the world’s CEOs see overregulation as their biggest threat.
All the cases so far are among people who have recently arrived from China.
Joel Carrett/AAP
Four people in Australia have tested positive to the Wuhan coronavirus so far. So how does it spread, who is most at risk, and what is Australia doing to reduce transmission?
How China appears to have learned from its response to the SARS crisis of 2003.
A worker in Wuhan, China removes biomedical waste from the Wuhan Medical Treatment Center, where many patients of the coronavirus have been treated, on Jan. 22, 2020.
AP Photo/Dake Kang
The coronavirus that has sickened hundreds in Wuhan, China, has worried health officials and other humans across the globe. Should people in the US worry?
Health authorities are worried because they don’t know how dangerous this strain of coronavirus could be.
Facundo Arrizaba BALAGA
The virus seems to spread like any other respiratory illness – through coughs and sneezes, or contact with contaminated surfaces. Here’s what we know about it so far.
Chinese cobra (Naja atra) with hood spread.
Briston/Wikimedia
A new coronavirus related to SARS and MERS has now traveled from China to the United States. A genetic analysis reveals that this deadly pathogen may have originated in snakes.
Chinese scientists sequence coronavirus causing pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan. And it’s never been seen before.
The low solar corona as viewed in extreme ultraviolet light. Bright regions are where the most energetic solar storms are born. An eruption in action can be seen in the bottom-left.
NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) satellite.
Scientists spend years preparing for the two-minute window of a total solar eclipse.
Bats are the only mammals capable of true flight. Scientists believe flight may influence their immune responses to coronoviruses, which cause fatal diseases such as SARS and MERS in humans.
(Shutterstock)
Scientific studies show that bats may carry “coronoviruses” causing SARS and MERS - without showing symptoms of disease. Could the bat immune system be key to human survival in future pandemics?
A total solar eclipse will be visible across parts of the United States Aug. 21, treating amateur and professional astronomers alike to sights similar to this NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory ultraviolet image of the moon eclipsing the sun on Jan. 31, 2014.
(NASA)
Viruses cause all kinds of infections from relatively mild cases of the flu to deadly outbreaks of Ebola. Clearly, not all viruses are equal and one of these differences is when you can infect others.
Avoiding contact with people who have respiratory infections – and are coughing or sneezing – is the key to protection.
Jina K/Shutterstock
Twelve years ago the world was threatened by an outbreak of a new coronavirus called SARS. MERS belongs to the same virus family and has killed 19 people in South Korea.
Honorary Enterprise Professor, School of Population and Global Health, and Department of General Practice and Primary Care, The University of Melbourne