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Older people are more susceptible to coronavirus: NICD

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The National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) says older people appear to be more susceptible to the coronavirus.

The virus has claimed the lives of 2804 people and the number of confirmed cases in 82170. China has the most cases with 78497/

NICD’s Head for Respiratory Diseases Prof Cheryl Cohen says the majority of the cases are in the older age groups.

Cohen says, “So there has been a lot of information that has come out of China recently which is the main area where the coronavirus is being experienced as well as a lot of information from a number of a lot of countries that have experienced cases and what we know about the cases that have severe illness and have died is that the majority of them are in the older age groups.”

“It seems to be that elderly people over the age of 60 are the ones that are more likely to have severe illness or die. And also amongst those severe cases relatively large percentage of them may have other underlying illnesses like heart disease or lung disease or other problem that make them more vulnerable to severe respiratory illness. In this way coronavirus is quite similar to other normal   respiratory viruses like influenza,” She adds

Audio of  Prof Cheryl Cohen explaining why older people are susceptible to the coronavirus:

 Clinical trials

Cohen says there is quite a lot of research going on in terms of a treatment for the virus.

“We need to understand this virus causes what we call pneumonia which is a low respiratory infection. There is a lot of treatment that we can give to people to get them over the illness, which is giving them oxygen or supporting their breathing, they need that kind of support. If people get this kind of support usually they will recover from the infection but there aren’t currently specific antiviral drugs that target this specific virus.”

She says results of the first clinical trial into finding treatment will be coming within a few weeks.

“There are a number of different antiviral drugs that are being tested right now in China, some of these are in the family of antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV and other are new antivirals that are being developed in laboratories to potentially work against this virus. Right now in China there are clinical trials and studies where these people are being given these treatments and compared to people who don’t get the treatment to see if any of these treatments actually results in an improved outcome, but these results are not available even though we heard that within a few weeks might have the first results coming.”

Prof Cheryl Cohen says the cases in China are dropping:

Below is a Live Tracking of the cases, death toll and other information:

Below is an infographic on the coronavirus:

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