12th March 2020
Eighteen years ago, on the 12th of March 2003, the World Health Organization published a report that would not hold great significance today, if at present the whole world were not struggling with the global Coronavirus pandemic.
As a result, information that may have seemed outdated some years ago has now become more relevant than ever.
The March 12, 2003 report marked the first warning by the WHO against the outbreak of a newly discovered disease and was shortly followed by a second report on March 16, in which the organisation began referring to the condition as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) — an illness that was later linked to the SARS-CoV-1 coronavirus, the now-infamous precursor to COVID-19.
In the initial March 12 article, the WHO shared its latest findings concerning serious cases of pneumonia that have surfaced in Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Guangdong province in China since mid-February 2003.
The disease was first identified on February 26, 2003, in Hanoi, Vietnam.
The health organisation reported that according to the Chinese government, 305 people in Guangdong province had already contracted this new form of lung infection in mid-February and that five deaths had occurred as a result.
Up until that period, studies conducted on patients in Vietnam had linked the new condition to common flu symptoms including high body temperature, muscle pain, headache, and sore throat.
There had also been instances where the disease resulted in a decrease of platelets and white blood cells in the blood –two conditions known respectively as thrombocytopenia and leucopenia– which led some patients to develop the much-more-severe bilateral pneumonia.
This serious lung-infection resulted, at times, in a form of respiratory failure known as Acute respiratory distress, which required the affected people to use respirators for assisted breathing.
The following WHO report came only four days later on March 16, 2003; the global health agency announced that it had received, as of March 15, 2003, reports of 150 cases of the newly emerging type of pneumonia to which it started referring as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).
As more research was conducted, the origins of this condition were linked to two strains of a novel virus referred to as Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus or SARS-CoV.
At the same time, Infections were climbing in numbers and spreading to new countries.
The WHO release specified that the number of infected individuals in Vietnam had risen to 43 as of March 15, 2003, five of whom required the use of a ventilator, along with two SARS-induced deaths that have occurred in the country up to that date.
Furthermore, the March 16 article noted that SARS had reached Singapore, where the Ministry of Health announced on March 13 that three individuals who had recently visited Hong Kong had been diagnosed with the disease.
By that point, SARS had already expanded beyond the Asian continent, with Canada reporting on March 15 seven cases of infection that resulted in two deaths, according to the same WHO report.
Luckily, China and other Asian countries immediately jumped into action: all major public congregation spots were equipped with temperature scanners, quarantines were imposed, and mask-wearing became a much more common practice.
As a result, the SARS epidemic remained largely contained within Asia and ended up impacting only a limited portion of the global population, with the number of cases stabilizing at 8,422 worldwide in June 2003 despite a relatively high mortality rate of 11%.
Another factor that helped limit the scope of the outbreak was the short incubation period of two to three days during which all infected individuals started exhibiting severe symptoms; by contrast, those who contract COVID-19 take around two weeks to display signs of illness, and some present no symptoms whatsoever.
This characteristic not only allowed the swift identification of people who had been affected by SARS but also facilitated tracking down those they had previously been in contact with and who could themselves be infected (contact tracing).
By June 2003, the WHO declared victory over the short-lived epidemic, and as of late 2004, the disease was completely eradicated. This halted all efforts to develop a cure or a vaccine suitable for human consumption.
The abandoned research could have, in retrospect, accelerated the process of developing a vaccine for COVID-19 had it been completed; this would have mitigated some of the damage caused by the pandemic in 2020 both to the world economy and to millions of human lives.
But while the SARS-CoV coronavirus had seemingly vanished from existence, its birthplace was still a mystery yet to be solved.
Fast forward to December 2017, a group of Chinese scientists that included virologist Shi Zhengli identified the same genetic composition of the virus that had caused the SARS outbreak 15 years ago in several horseshoe bats residing in a cave in the Chinese province of Yunnan.
Having spent years tracking down the origins of the SARS-CoV coronavirus across China, the research team — which is, strangely enough, based in the Wuhan Institute of Virology– warned at the time that “another deadly outbreak of SARS could emerge at any time.”
Unfortunately, the concern of Shi Zhengli and her co-workers was proved right two years later on a scale that no one could have predicted, with the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 -a new and far more transmissible strain of SARS-CoV that has resulted in the ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic.
How ironic that a prophecy originating from Wuhan ended up coming true in the Chinese city itself.
