Talk:SARS

Wow. Major error in talking about 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic.
Prior to this edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome&diff=548177818&oldid=546670739

we had been saying that fatality during the 1918 pandemic was 20%. Whereas a commonly given figure is >2.5% (greater than two-and-a-half percent).

1918 Influenza: the Mother of All Pandemics, CDC, Jeffery Taubenberger, David Morens, January 2006.

And since it's >2.5%, let's bump it up to 3% to avoid errors during quick reading (which may have been one of the things which caused this mistake). Cool Nerd (talk) 17:40, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

small outbreak year later in December 2003--January 2004
Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, David Quammen, Norton & Company, 2012, pages 167-208.

page 192:

"In late December, it did. Like an aftershock to a quake, a new case broke in Guangdong.  Soon afterward, three more.  On patient was a waitress who had been exposed to a civet.  On January 5, 2004, the day the first case was confirmed, Guangdong authorities reversed policy again, ordering the death and disposal of every masked palm civet held at a farm or a market in the province.  .  .  "

" .  .  .  Woops, civets aren't the reservoir of SARS.  .  .  "

page 207:

" .  .  .  One further factor, possibly the most crucial, was inherent to the way SARS-CoV affects the human body: Symptoms tend to appear in a person before, rather than after, that person becomes highly infectious.  The headache, the fever, and the chills--maybe even the cough--precede the major discharge of virus toward other people.  Even among some of the superspreaders, in 2003, this seems to have been true.  .  .  "


 * If true, this is an important fact which we should include. The author Mr. David Quammen is the author of other books and is also a contributing writer for National Geographic.  I'd like to see if we get some additional sources on this point if possible.  A seasoned science writer can be a very good source.  I just want additional good sources if possible.  Cool Nerd (talk) 23:50, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

---

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/07/world/the-sars-scare-in-china-slaughter-of-the-animals.html

China confirms two new Sars cases, BBC, January 17, 2004:

" .  .  .  Officials say that Sars symptoms appear to be milder this year, but have warned the population to be vigilant especially during the coming week-long Chinese Lunar New Year holiday.  .  .  "

Relatively small outbreak in March - April 2004
http://www.who.int/csr/don/2004_04_30/en/


 * posted by Cool Nerd (talk) 20:37, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

WHO Statistics are Badly Misquoted
There is a significant disparity between the statistics shown in the article and those from the reference: WHO Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response (EPR) For example, for the US, the referenced article shows 33 cases with 0 deaths, and Wikipedia shows 71 cases with 4 deaths.

These errors are also in the graphic

--JeremyCarroll (talk) 01:12, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

The statistics in the table seem to have been corrected, but the graphic is still erroneous. 216.246.247.74 (talk) 02:07, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
 * There seems to be another error in number of cases; "8,273" in introduction is not stated in cited source (it's 8096 according to WHO), and source that states "8,273 cases" in epidemiology section is not available any more--Faskal (talk) 11:32, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

SARS-1 like SARS-CoV-2 is easily spread, there could been up to 10,000 Canadians exposed to the SARS-1 virus, but they documented the most symptomatic and hospitalized cases. Canadian health and WHO authorities succeeded in ending the further spread of SARS-1 in the world, especially in Toronto and it didn't spread too much beyond the metropolis. Unfortunately, SARS-1 and maybe MERS mutated into COVID-19 to become the biggest global pandemic in over a century for being easier spread than SARS-1 with more asymptomatic people and 4 million confirmed cases while 76 million more were thought to been exposed worldwide in 195 countries and territories (Dec 2019-May 2020). 80 million people is 1% of humanity, esp. in heavily populated China with 1.4 billion people, it's place of origin Wuhan has 11 million alone. And SARS-1 and COVID-19 might well have similar percentage death rates of confirmed infections going by more exposures. 2605:E000:100D:C571:7D82:A683:E434:DB3D (talk) 00:30, 9 May 2020 (UTC)

How did it end?
There doesn't seem to be any information in the article about how the outbreaks were ultimately contained and why this didn't become a pandemic. It would be nice to know, for example, if there are still a few cases per year or if this was a 'one-time' syndrome that's just never been heard from again? Have there been any cases at all since 2004? If not why not? If it was actually due to successful containment efforts by public health authorities all over the world, that seems like a triumph worth noting. If it was mysterious, it would be good to know that too. A section on 'aftermath' would be a nice place to sum up even if it amounted to little more than something like "The epidemic stopped as suddenly as it began and nobody knows why. There have been no further cases." --Arvedui (talk) 12:45, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

Re: How did it end?
It was reported that the 2003 SARS virus mutated into a much less pathogenic, more contagious form and this cold-like virus dominated over the more lethal strains. It would be important to include information on this somewhere.

Spope3 (talk) 20:57, 28 November 2021 (UTC)

Tattoos?
In the second section where they talk about transmission of SARS, they talk about physical or sexual contact including tattoos.

How is the tattoos part relevant and should I remove it?

Mattsung (talk) 22:46, 1 August 2013 (UTC)


 * This presumably refers to blood-borne infection as a result of the process of tattooing, not physical contact with tattooed skin -- The Anome (talk) 20:48, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

SARS origin traced to bats?
This recent report appears to suggest that the origin of SARS has finally been confirmed to be from bats:



-- The Anome (talk) 18:01, 31 October 2013 (UTC)


 * The SARS virus isolated from humans was identified as a coronavirus during the SARS outbreak. The Alpha and Betacoronaviruses are known to be from bats. However, with the SARS outbreak, there was no contact with bats reported, but there were reports of contact with Chinese civets in a live animal market which also traded in bats. However, bats isolated in the area of the index patient of the SARS outbreak did not return any isolates related to those found in the patients. This recent discovery of live SL-CoV-WIV1 was found in the dung of Chinese horseshoe bats. It is the closest SARS-like virus found in a bat to date. It is a close strain to the isolates found in the SARS patients. Unlike the MERS-CoV which has an exact match between the MERS index patient and an Egyptian tomb bat suggesting that bat, or a bat from that roost actually infected the MERS index patient. Malke 2010 (talk) 21:52, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Who the hell is Mckay Dennis?
Section: History "The first reported case of SARS [...] the patient, a farmer, was treated in the First People's Hospital of Foshan (Mckay Dennis). The patient died soon after..."

This paragraph is widespread over the internet, but no other information exists regarding this supposed chinese farmer with an english name. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.19.228.4 (talk) 17:24, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

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Possible Edits I would like to make
I think one of the major changes that has to occur in the article is in fact the way the data is presented. I believe that if the data was presented in a much more coherent way with less misquotes, it would help with the piece. Furthermore, the article fails in really discussing the aftermath of the breakout. Were there cases after 2003? How was this contained? The resolution is missing when it comes to this article with other pieces of information that can possibly be added on to fill in the gaps.JD Johns (talk) 21:13, 19 October 2017 (UTC)


 * I largely agree. Anyway, WP:BE BOLD. Alcherin (talk) 21:17, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Potential Bibliography
These are potential cites in addition to the ones already listed to edit the article. Let me know what you think

Arnold, Carrie ( 2012, December, 27). " What Turns a Disease into a Pandemic? Beware of the Superspreaders". Retrieved from http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/pandemics/2012/12/superspreaders_of_disease_sars_and_other_pandemics_are_spread_by_modern.html

CDC. " CDC SARS Response". Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/about/history/sars/timeline.htm

Institute of Medicine; Board on Global Health; Forum on Microbial Threats; Stacey Knobler, Adel Mahmoud, Stanley Lemon, Alison Mack, Laura Sivitz, and Katherine Oberholtzer, Editors. “Learning from SARS: Preparing for the Next Disease Outbreak: Workshop Summary.” Preparing for the Next Disease Outbreak: Workshop Summary | The National Academies Press, 26 Jan. 2004, www.nap.edu/catalog/10915/learning-from-sars-preparing-for-the-next-disease-outbreak-workshop.

Journal of Virology ( 2005, February). "Civets Are Equally Susceptible to Experimental Infection by Two Different Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus Isolates". Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC546564/

World Health Organization ( 2003, April 16). " The Operational Response to SARS". Retrieved from http://www.who.int/csr/sars/goarn2003_4_16/en/

Miller, Terri ( 2004 January 01). "SARS: Is the worst over?". Retrieved from http://www.modernmedicine.com/modern-medicine/content/sars-worst-over?page=full

JD Johns (talk) 00:11, 20 October 2017 (UTC)


 * The Slate article should be fine, so long as it isn't used to cite any extrraordinary medical claims, as aside from Slate being a generally reliable source, the author's work has been published in several other reliable sources previously as well. The CDC and WHO sources are reliable in this context given what information they include, as are the journal and the workshop summary/book that have been through peer-reviewed publishers without issue. Finally the ModernMedicine article has a full bibliography of its own and should be alright, although it must be considered that being a contemporary source using even older contemporary sources, it may have outdated information. See WP:MEDRS for further details. Alcherin (talk) 02:52, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

Toronto's Racism
I've never been to Toronto. Maybe they're as racist as this article makes them out to be. But the source for the claim that "Toronto's Asian minority population faced increased discrimination over the course of the city's outbreak...." is just a letter written by a masters student (Schram) catagorized under "Personal Views." It's essentially an editorial. (With respect to its author, writing a rigorous study was clearly not his intent. Nothing that follows is meant to cast doubt on his qualities as an academic.) Schram has neither data for nor first-hand knowledge of the events he's discussing. The only support for the claims are two broad, unsourced statements from advocacy groups, themselves based on rumor, not research.

Such reports would certainly have been troubling (at the time) if true, and might have been worth examining further. But as it stands, this evidence is far too thin to justify painting an entire city as racist. Even more so since the claim is only tangentially related to the subject of the article. I intend to remove the claim and its source from the article in a few days if there is no objection. Honus W Scruggs (talk) 19:35, 23 January 2020 (UTC)


 * At the time, both the Prime Minister at the time (Jean Chretien) and future Prime Minister (Paul Martin) came out publicly to attempt to reduce the discrimination against the Chinese community in Toronto. Smg3d (talk) 23:47, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Bad wording
Quote from the article: The first super-spreader was admitted to the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital in Guangzhou on 31 January, which soon spread the disease to nearby hospitals. [...] Subsequent to this, the WHO requested information from Chinese authorities on 5 and 11 December. - This sounds like the WHO waited almost a year, until late 2003, until it requested further information. The section should be reworded to avoid confusion. Renerpho (talk) 06:27, 1 February 2020 (UTC)
 * What's bad about the wording? NewsGuard (talk) 06:07, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

Passing mention of this Wikipedia article in press
--- Another Believer ( Talk ) 20:06, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
 * https://www.wired.co.uk/article/wikipedia-coronavirus

Contested deletion
This page should not be speedily deleted because the reason given for speedy deletion makes no sense

"Super Glue (BTD6) + COVID-19 equals Hematic grenade in Titanfall 3."

--justink_ase (talk) 06:12, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

Pictures
Could more pictures be added, e. g. electron microscopy? Having only one picture does not give enough detail information, IMO. 2A02:8388:1641:8380:3AD5:47FF:FE18:CC7F (talk) 23:06, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

"COVID-02" listed at Redirects for discussion
A discussion is taking place to address the redirect COVID-02. The discussion will occur at Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 May 16 until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. CrazyBoy826 (talk &#124; contribs) 00:12, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

"COVID-03" listed at Redirects for discussion
A discussion is taking place to address the redirect COVID-03. The discussion will occur at Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 May 16 until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. CrazyBoy826 (talk &#124; contribs) 17:31, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

SARS Interpretation
SARS stands for South Asia Respiratory Syndrome Multidirection6666 (talk) 16:02, 18 October 2020 (UTC)

Lab leak
brought up an interesting point in another discussion. He said that SARS 1 has leaked from a lab and infected people, twice. I found this Washington Post article supporting the idea.

Is this true? Does scientific literature agree with this? I would be open to including this if there is strong scientific evidence. – Novem Linguae (talk) 21:25, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Never mind. It's already included in the article, in the "Date of Containment" section. Took me awhile to find the right article, then the right section. – Novem Linguae (talk) 21:58, 11 January 2021 (UTC)


 * (ec) Here's a selection of sources of various types and date. Of course, they cite even more sources too.


 * 1) Breaches of safety regulations are probable cause of recent SARS outbreak, WHO says
 * 2) Officials punished for SARS virus leak
 * 3) Potential Risks and Benefits of Gain-of-Function Research
 * 4) The Lab-Leak Hypothesis

I'm not sure what coverage we have of this already as there are lots of pages about these topics. Andrew🐉(talk) 22:04, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

Requested move 8 December 2021

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 

The result of the move request was: MOVE. Daniel Case (talk) 06:47, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

Severe acute respiratory syndrome → SARS – Per WP:COMMONNAME, WP:RECOGNIZABILITY and WP:CONCISE. The proposed target name already redirects to the current article title, and I am confident there is no question over whether this is a proper WP:PRIMARYTOPIC for the term and no question over whether the proposed term is more widely recognized than the current article title. See also the March 2021 RM that resulted in moving to, as recorded at Talk:COVID-19/Archive 17. WP:ACROTITLE says "Acronyms should be used in a page name if the subject is known primarily by its abbreviation and that abbreviation is primarily associated with the subject", and that is the case here. WP:ACROTITLE also says "In general, if readers somewhat familiar with the subject are likely to only recognise the name by its acronym, then the acronym should be used as a title," and it is certainly the case that some laypersons who are somewhat (but only minimally) familiar with this subject are likely to only recognise the topic by the acronym rather than the spelled-out phrase. Also see and. When looking for high quality sources, Google Scholar shows 1.7M hits for the proposed title and only 0.4M hits for the current title. Google Ngram also shows the proposed name being dramatically more frequently used (see here). —&#8288;&#8202;&#8288;BarrelProof (talk) 19:25, 8 December 2021 (UTC) The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
 * Support per WP:COMMONNAME.--Ortizesp (talk) 00:06, 9 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Support per nom and WP:ACROTITLE—blindlynx 14:55, 9 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Support, definitely more recognizable. HIV/AIDS is a good comparison. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 20:44, 9 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Britannica uses just SARS so this seems reasonable especially given consistency with similar articles.  Crouch, Swale  ( talk ) 22:50, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Support It goes by like SARS; people forget what that stands for. Dicklyon (talk) 21:41, 11 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Support The proposed title is the common name. LSGH (talk) (contributions) 13:39, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

Deaths
The number of deaths needs to be changed. It was more than 800.49.178.189.141 (talk) 10:57, 27 February 2022 (UTC)


 * We would need a source for this. Graham Beards (talk) 11:28, 27 February 2022 (UTC)


 * Here is a good source: https://www.healthdirect.gov.au/severe-acute-respiratory-syndrome-sars 49.178.189.141 (talk) 11:54, 27 February 2022 (UTC)


 * That's not acceptable, we need one which is compliant with our policies. Graham Beards (talk) 12:05, 27 February 2022 (UTC)


 * This is acceptable, "https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/09/coronavirus-global-death-toll-overtakes-sars-epidemic" 49.178.189.141 (talk) 12:23, 27 February 2022 (UTC)


 * It says "(Sars)...killed 774 people" which is not more than 800 but closer to 782 as stated in this article. Graham Beards (talk) 12:49, 27 February 2022 (UTC)


 * So why does this page give a totally different number. And why does it say citation needed?49.178.189.141 (talk) 13:37, 27 February 2022 (UTC)


 * Because the Info Box was not updated in accordance with the Table in the article. Thanks for pointing out this minor inconsistency. Graham Beards (talk) 20:03, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

How come this article does not mention Civits
The intermediate species for transmission that was discovered very early on? Tuntable (talk) 22:32, 24 March 2022 (UTC)


 * if you had looked for the correct spelling ("civets") you would have found a mention in the very first paragraph In the 2010s, Chinese scientists traced the virus through the intermediary of Asian palm civets to cave-dwelling horseshoe bats in Xiyang Yi Ethnic Township, Yunnan. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 01:29, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

*Sudden* acute respiratory syndrome? No, it should only be called "severe".
This Wikipedia article is propagating and amplifying a typographical, auto-correction, or other error in a single, non-contemporaneous web page to create a new name for "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome". In the informational box/tone box at the top of the article a single citation is given for claiming that sudden acute respiratory syndrome is a less-common synonym for SARS. Reading the source article, it never mentions the word "severe", although all of its citations use the word severe, and the source article is introducing this new term ("sudden") 2-3 years after the events of SARS-1 finished. Furthermore, web searching for the phrase 'sudden acute respiratory syndrome' returns only the source webpage, the Wikipedia entry for SARS, but no other information contemporaneous with the actual SARS-1 epidemic. This synonym ("sudden") should be removed from Wikipedia: it is simply propagating bad information. Pwfen (talk) 15:18, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Technical and Scientific Communication
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Wiki Education assignment: The Microbiology of College Life
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