Mathematics Might Be The Key To Control Coronavirus Outbreak

Back in 2018, Diseases X was added to the WHO list of priority diseases (the World Health Organization). Other names on the list are SARS and Ebola.

Disease X is not the name of a particular pandemic but a blank space for an infectious agent. This means WHO always prepares for an outbreak of a disease unknown to the world before.

With the Coronavirus spreading fear all over the world, the question here is whether it is the Disease X WHO has been preparing for. The Chinese city of Wuhan, with 11 million citizens, is suffering from a serious case of pneumonia caused by the Coronavirus. The virus appears to be transferred from animals to humans. The breeding ground of the disease is projected to be a seafood market. And now, it is proven that human-to-human transmission is possible.

With 20,000 infected cases and 400 people have died from the disease, the pandemic has caused more deaths than SARS. The disease is not limited inside the Chinese borders anymore as there are confirmed and suspected cases in the USA, South Korea, and Thailand.

To contain the spread of the disease, transport system to and from Wuhan and Huanggang, a nearby city has been shut down. People have been warned not to travel from and to the city.

Along with treating those who have already fallen ill from the Coronavirus, planning and forecasting the development of the pandemic is necessary and the most valuable tool we have now is mathematics modeling. We have another advantage that can help to increase the accuracy of the model, which is the fact that the pathogen behind this outbreak is understood.

In the early days when the pandemic has just started, it was challenging to identify the infectious agent as conducting virological tests time-consuming. This leads to a question of whether it is possible to address the pathogen before virological tests yield results.

Robin Thompson, a mathematician from Oxford and his colleagues at Prof. Hiroshi Nishiura lab from Hokkaido University, Japan have been conducting tests to see find the similarities between this current Coronavirus outbreak and some previous outbreaks, which infected by pathogens of known aetiology.

Over time, as more information becomes available to the mathematicians, the model has been updated with more known facts. The experts applied Bayes’ rule and found out that we can obtain the relative probability that the Wuhan outbreak is caused by each of the known pathogens:

variables is a priori probability that the Coronavirus pandemic is caused by the pathogen i.

This offers relative probabilities of each pathogen being the agent that causes the outbreak. The analysis can be developed to determine if the characteristics of the Wuhan outbreak is similar to those of previous ones driven by the known pathogens.

If this outbreak is proven to be different from the previous pandemics, it is possible that we are experiencing Disease X WHO fears, a disease the world has never seen before.

Thanks to genome sequencing, we can be sure that the Wuhan Coronavirus shares some similarities with the one behind SARS, which wreaked havoc in 2002 and 2003.

Lucky for us, the case fatality rate of the current outbreak is much lower than that of SARS, meaning a lower proportion of patients carrying the virus dies of it.

Understanding the epidemiological factors of SARS was the key to controlling it. In the next few days, we will have a clearer idea of the similarities between the Coronavirus and the one that caused SARS. And mathematics is our best tool now to gain knowledge of the way the virus transmits as well as the way to keep the outbreak under control.

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