Vaccine against coronavirus expected in April

South China Morning Post

China says research on coronavirus vaccines is well under way, and some will be available for emergency and clinical research use next month.

Zheng Zhongwei, director of the National Health Commission’s Science and Technology Development Centre, said the five approaches to vaccines were being pursued and advancing steadily.

But China was still learning more about the new coronavirus, and difficulties were expected during the research, he said.

Separately, Ding Xiangyang, a central government official who is part of the team overseeing coronavirus containment in Hubei province, the epicentre of the epidemic, said applications would be made next month for some vaccines to advance to clinical trials.

Children at ‘same risk’ as adults

Children are as likely to be infected by the new coronavirus as adults, according to scientists analysing infection data from the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.

The researchers found a household attack rate – the probability of disease transmission from an infected household member – of 15 per cent, much higher than the population average of 7.9 per cent. But the same study found the rate of infection in children aged under 10 was very similar to the population as a whole, at 7.4 per cent.

“There was no significant association between the probability of infection and age of the index case,” the researchers said, after studying data from 391 confirmed cases in Shenzhen, from January 14 to February 12, as well as 1,286 people who had been in close contact with patients.

The researchers – from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Shenzhen Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, Harbin Institute of Technology at Shenzhen and Peng Cheng Laboratory in Shenzhen – published their preprint paper on medRxiv, an online sharing resource for the medical and scientific communities.

The paper said only nine per cent of the 391 cases were severe, with most patients in either mild or moderate condition, but 84 per cent of cases presented with fever at their initial assessment.

New Hubei infections confined to Wuhan
For the first time since China started publishing national infection data for Covid-19 – the disease caused by the coronavirus – there were no new infections in Hubei province outside its capital Wuhan, where the outbreak originated.

China’s National Health Commission said on Friday all of the 126 new cases in the province were in Wuhan. There were 29 new deaths in Hubei, of which 23 were in the provincial capital, bringing the province’s total death toll to 2,931.

The latest figures follow a prediction on Thursday by senior Chinese researcher Zhang Boli – one of the 14 members on a research team working to control the outbreak – who said he expected cases in Hubei to peak in mid-March.

“According to our analysis of the statistics, we expect cities other than Wuhan in Hubei province to be basically free of coronavirus patients in the middle of March,” Zhang was quoted as saying by People’s Daily. “The hope is that Wuhan won’t have daily new cases in late March.”

Overall, there were 143 new cases and 30 new deaths on mainland China, bringing total infections to 80,552 and deaths to 3,042.