What is the Coronavirus? This is an _____1______ of disease that started in Wuhan, one of the central Chinese cities. It’s caused by a novel coronavirus that means it's _____2______ , so new that actually it doesn't have a name yet. It’s from a family called the corona viruses. The symptoms of this illness are pretty mundane on the face of it. It’s a dry cough fever and then ______3_____ problems. It seems quite mild in lots of people and probably those people don't end up in hospital at all. We only know about ______4_____ which is where people have gone on to develop viral pneumonia and those people obviously end up in hospital and all the deaths have been _____5______ those people. This brand new corona virus came from animals and it's believed that the source was actually _____6______ in Wuhan, which also sells wild animals. So far as far as we know all the cases have come out of Wuhan, so some of these people are in places like _____7______ and Japan, but they haven't picked it up there, they actually got it in Wuhan and then they traveled. In China where the most cases are, it's older people who are ending up in hospital with this. They're usually over 40 and the very youngest person _____8______ is about 13 or 14 years old, so it doesn't appear to be affecting small children and those who have died tend actually to have ______9_____ as they say. They...they're frail, they may have heart disease or cancer already, and so they're _____10______ . Basically their _____11______ are not very ____12_______ and they're going to find it very hard to _____13______ a virus. We've only just discovered that the new corona virus is actually transmitted from one person to another. It was hoped at first actually that it just came from animals as all corona viruses do, but now it looks as though , it is actually passed from one human being to another, so we've got ____14_______ because the markets been closed for some time, and there are cases in people who've never been near it. So there actually isn't any treatment at the moment at all. Because this is a virus, _____15______ won't work that they only work against bacteria, not viruses, so really you want to know antiviral treatment, but none of the flu drugs that we've got we have got a couple of those will work on this. A corona virus is different from a _____16______ virus, so there actually isn't any treatment at the moment at all. This one is scary because it is a brand new virus, so we don't know how it's going to behave, but I have to say we perhaps ought to put it in the context of some of the other things. I went to Sierra Leone to ____17_______ the West Africa outbreak of Ebola , and that was killing more than half of all those people who were infected. SARS which was a novel coronavirus just like this one b ack in 2002 did end up causing ____18_______ and that was largely because nobody had ever seen it before, but also the death rate was at around 10%. All here so far we're talking about a death rate of 2%, which is a lot less and it does look as if many of those people actually have had underlying health problems which would make it more likely that they would die. They could equally have died of flu, so you have to put it into that context I think.