Fatality rate of Covid-19 10-fold less than that of SARS, MERS epidemics: Nobel laureate Sir Peter Ratcliffe

NEW DELHI: Nobel laureate Sir Peter Ratcliffe, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine last year, said though the Covid-19 pandemic “looks as if it has been quite a close shave for humanity but its fatality rate is much less than that of other coronaviruses like SARS and MERS”.
In an interview released by the European Research Council, the Nobel laureate said, “It (Covid-19) has surely upset the entire world, caused the sad death of hundreds of thousands of people. However, the case fatality rate is probably more than ten-fold less than it has been for other recorded coronaviruses that caused the original SARS and MERS epidemics. It’s a matter of good fortune that this virus, which is much more infectious, is substantially less dangerous.”
On global coordination to deal with this pandemic, the Nobel laureate said, “I think scientists have not been any less coordinated than any other group of human beings. Sadly, one thing this epidemic demonstrates is that there is a mismatch between economic dependency, human dependency and political dependency. We have vast social networks of people travelling rapidly all over the world for one reason or another... and we have massive economic dependency on production and manufacturing in different parts of the world, but we don't have political coherence. That problem is clearly evident now.”
Ratcliffe said he learnt about the coroanvirus in January itself. “My son who is working in Hong Kong called me to ask if this was anything he should worry about. Then I spoke with my colleague Jeremy Farrar, who is an infectious disease expert, and he warned then back in January that this looked very serious.”
About the “silent hypoxia” condition in Covid patients when a patient has low oxygen levels without being aware of it, he said, “The process of matching lung perfusion (the rate at which blood is delivered to tissue) to ventilation fails in many lung diseases, but the failure in Covid-19 appears more severe. This is a process whereby lung vessels constrict in order to limit the blood flow to hypoxic regions of the lung. Now, why is this hypoxia “silent”? Curiously, given the importance of hypoxia, the brain does not respond to it with alarm signals. The patient experiences a feeling of euphoria or intoxication, rather than alarm.”
Ratcliffe said the world is in a “better place than we were in 1918 during the Spanish flu epidemic. We know what this virus is and the sequence of nucleic acids. We know how to make a diagnosis using the polymerase chain reaction. We know how to measure antibodies. We know broadly the life cycle of the virus. The challenge we now face is a coordinated response of bringing that knowledge together on a particular problem on a rapid timescale”.