Medical staff wearing protective clothing work inside a ward that receives any person who may have been infected with coronavirus, at the Rajiv Ghandhi Government General hospital in Chennai, India, January 29, 2020.
- Scientists are racing to learn more about the coronavirus that emerged in Wuhan, China last month.
- The virus has killed more than 259 people and infected at least 12,000.
- Preliminary research, some of which has not been peer reviewed, suggests that 75,800 people in Wuhan alone could be infected. A study also suggests Bangkok is the most at-risk city outside of China.
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Scientists are racing to learn more about a new coronavirus that has swept through China and spread across the globe.
The virus, which may have jumped from animals to people at a market in the city of Wuhan, has killed 259 people and infected at least 12,000.
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus outbreak a global public-health emergency on Thursday. The declaration has only been used five times since it was created in 2005.
Scientists worldwide are trying to study the coronavirus and potentially develop a vaccine. Nature identified over 50 English-language studies on the virus published since January 12. More than 30 were published in pre-print servers without peer review, since the peer-review process can take months, and this virus is spreading quickly. A handful appeared in peer-reviewed journals, however.
"The primary benefit is probably in scientists being able to improve their work, to see what other scientists are working on, and come up with some consensus," Maia Majumder, a computational epidemiologist at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, told Wired. "For outbreaks especially, I think no matter how hard a journal tries to make review as rapid as possible, there's still going to be a delay."
Although it's preliminary, here's what published research has shown so far.
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