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  • [Electronic Music]

  • Coronaviruses are a type of virus they're called RNA viruses and they can

  • infect both humans and animals. So there are four human coronaviruses that

  • circulate each year in people they usually have an uptick in the winter

  • months particularly in regions like the United States and they cause between 10

  • and 30% of upper respiratory tract infections in adults. They're very

  • similar to the common cold and they don't tend to cause severe disease. So

  • far the reports that we've had from Wuhan are that people are presenting

  • with a pneumonia, so basically what that means is they're having a bad cough,

  • shortness of breath, sometimes they go on to develop respiratory failure. They

  • can't breathe on their own and then in some cases die from that. Most of the

  • cases have also reported a fever. We don't know a whole lot about how the

  • virus is spread, we're assuming that it came from an animal but we don't know

  • which one and then came into the human population that way. There's now clear

  • evidence that it's also being transmitted from person to person which

  • is new in the past week. How quickly things are spreading and whether that

  • person-to-person transmission will continue and sustain a major outbreak we

  • don't know the answer to those questions. There's no treatment or vaccine for any

  • of the coronaviruses that are in humans even the typical ones that we see all

  • the time that caused common cold symptoms. The the risk of obtaining this

  • virus in the U.S. is so low unless you've traveled to Wuhan. Here at Penn

  • State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center we're always prepared for unusual

  • and concerning infectious diseases. We've been preparing for this ever since the

  • Ebola outbreak in 2014 and we have plans in place in case we would have a case of

  • this virus here. In the United States the Centers for

  • Disease Control and Prevention is our first line about tracking and obtaining

  • information on this new virus they maintain a very nice website that gives

  • updated information about the cases that they're seeing in Wuhan, risk to other

  • areas in the world, what to do if you need to travel and what to do if you

  • have symptoms.

  • [Electronic Music]

[Electronic Music]

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