The bad news is that these efforts will likely face the perennial hurdles of medical innovation: long timelines (particularly for vaccines, since they’re used in healthy people), fickle funding, and changing political priorities. In the US, a phase 1 clinical trial of a vaccine is already underway. Many of the vaccine and drug development efforts are building on past efforts to deal with other viral outbreaks, including coronaviruses like MERS and SARS - which means researchers had a head start with Covid-19. These developments now hold the key to creating what could end this outbreak for good: vaccines and pharmaceutical treatments. The structure of the virus was revealed shortly thereafter. Within a couple of weeks of discovering the outbreak, Chinese scientists sequenced the virus’s genome and shared it with the world. ![]() The good news is that the world is in better shape to come up with a medical solution - a coronavirus drug or vaccine - than it’s ever been. Health officials are relying on tactics like quarantines and social distancing while hospitals (which fear equipment shortages) are using oxygen and fever reducers, like ibuprofen, to treat people. They’re already having big economic and social side effects. For these reasons, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19 a global public health emergency back in January (and later said it had become a pandemic).Īs this new virus makes its way around the globe, the public health tools we have to control its spread are blunt, often not implemented correctly or fast enough. And there’s a lot we don’t know about it since it was only discovered mere months ago. But people of all ages are at risk of severe illness and death. ![]() The virus has already shown it has the potential to kill - particularly vulnerable groups, like older adults and people with underlying health conditions. The global race to make a vaccine and treatment for the Covid-19 coronavirus is well underway as the epicenter of the pandemic is now shifting toward the United States.
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