India Confirms first Wuhan Coronavirus Case

Indian health officials said the virus had been found in a patient in Kerala.

Meanwhile the Philippines and the United Arab Emirates also have their first cases. In India, The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare said the country’s first case was a patient in Kerala, a female student, in the southwestern coastal state. You can read their statement here.

The case was confirmed to the government by the National Institute of Virology, and that the person is “stable and being closely monitored.” The problem is the virus appears very contagious. It has already spread to every region of China. This in spite of travel bans and lockdowns of entire cities like Wuhan itself, which people describe as a ghost town.

Delhi has a plane ready to fly to Wuhan and pick up Indian nationals with no evidence of sickness but is awaiting permission from Chinese authorities. China is itself mixed on whether to let potentially infected cases leave their country, but remains politically forced to accept these “rescue flights”.

This is the first case of coronavirus in the country. What’s alarming is that the discovery of coronavirus in India means that the world’s two most populous nations are now under the umbrella of the dreaded disease. At the Last Futurist, we’ve warned that the spread in India and Africa are potentially very dangerous. Some even believe the Wuhan virus has the potential to become a global pandemic.

So what does erring on the side of caution look like? There have even been cases where a 10-year old infected patient showed no symptoms but was contagious. How do we protect ourselves from a virus like this?

The World Health Organization will again meet Thursday (today), to decide if the outbreak should be considered a global health emergency. Now there are over 20 countries that have live cases of the Wuhan Virus with human to human transmission having occurred in at least 4: China, Germany, Japan and Vietnam.

Hong Kong and Singapore are potentially in a very dangerous situation due to their proximity and contact with infected regions. But India is vulnerable at a whole different level, where contagion could be more serious if an outbreak occurs there.

India and China account for nearly 36 percent of the global population. This means that the spread of the deadly disease in the country could put a large chunk of the world’s population at risk. A vaccine would take easily a year, and mutations in the virus could complicate that process.

While the Wuhan Virus belongs to the same family as SARS and MERS, it is far less dangerous and potentially far more contagious, meaning it could be around for months, not just weeks. Experts are mixed on when the Wuhan Virus could peak, as global spread is just now occurring and it’s unclear how serious it might become.