Panic Gone Viral

It started in a far-off Chinese province whose name sounds as foreign as the disease it spawned. But the virus that Wuhan begot is now a looming pandemic, a microscopic pathogen that is spreading panic and death everywhere it lands.

Little is known about this new strain of coronavirus — known as Covid-19, after Coronavirus disease 2019, the year it emerged — aside for the videos seen in China in its early days, at the end of December. People were dropping dead on the street, and healthcare workers were afraid to handle the bodies. On Friday, the number of cases worldwide hit 100,000, and nearly 3,400 have died.

Will this new, rapidly spreading strain rival the deadly Spanish flu outbreak of 1918? Or will it amount to a temporary blip that will disappear as warmer weather arrives?

We just don’t know, said Dr. Reuven D. Cofsky,  chief of infectious diseases at Brookdale Hospital in Brooklyn. The only two facts that count, he added, are that coronavirus is much more contagious than flu, and that viruses tend to burn out in the heat of summer.