New Hampshire is waiting to receive test kits that will let the state know if the new coronavirus known as COVID-19 shows up in New Hampshire, a search that will be complicated by a surging flu season that has risen to levels not seen since 2018.
If COVID-19 is found, the state Department of Health and Human Services has the legal authority to isolate the patient, either in their home or in a hospital, to contain the spread.
“Most of the time … that happens on a voluntary basis. It doesn’t usually require an official order,” said Dr. Benjamin Chan, the state epidemiologist. He said “one or two” isolation orders are issued most years in the state, often related to tuberculosis, which is highly contagious.
Isolation orders concern patients who are showing symptoms. That differs from a quarantine order, which involves isolating a person who has not shown any symptoms. Chan did not know if New Hampshire has ever issued quarantine orders but said he had not heard of any examples.
There is no vaccine or cure for COVID-19. It can be fatal, particularly in the elderly or those who have other health issues, but most people who have gotten the disease recover fully.
The state Public Health Laboratory in Concord can identify many diseases but currently the only way to know if somebody has COVID-19 is for a doctor to take a swab from their nose or mouth and send it to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Ga. There it is analyzed through the use of a common procedure known as PCR that shows the genetic makeup of the virus causing the disease.
Three adults in New Hampshire have been tested for COVID-19, but none had the disease, Chan said.
“Tests are usually specific to a disease, so when testing for influenza and COVID-19, even though the type of test can be the same … the reagents you use to detect the virus are different,” said Chan. Reagents are chemicals that are used in analysis.
The CDC created test kits that could be used by labs to identify COVID-19 themselves, but problems were found with the reagents and the kits are being redesigned. State labs like that in New Hampshire hope to have test kits soon.
Tests for COVID-19 in New Hampshire are being done on the basis of symptoms and “epidemiological risk factors,” which measure the likelihood that somebody could have been exposed to the disease. Because COVID-19 is not yet circulating in the U.S., the major risk factor is recent travel to China.
New Hampshire, like most of the country, is currently seeing a surge in cases of influenza, which produces many of the same symptoms as COVID-19, such as fever and cough.
There’s no exact count of flu numbers but two measures are used to roughly track its spread. As of the first week of February, both of those measures – surveys of “influenza-like illnesses” from health care providers, and emergency clinic cases involving respiratory illness – were at the highest level since February 2018 and were still on the rise.
As of Tuesday, 53 people in the U.S. have been identified as having COVID-19, mostly in people who were aboard the cruise ship Diamond Princess in Japan when an outbreak occurred on board.
CDC official Dr. Nancy Messonnier told reports Tuesday that it’s all but certain this number will rise and an outbreak of the disease will happen in this country.
COVID-19 stands for ”coronavirus disease 2019,” and is caused by one of a number of coronaviruses.
“They are a large family of viruses, most of them we believe infect animals, with seven strains that affect humans,” said Dr. Chan. “Four are common strains that routinely circulate and cause upwards of 25 to 30% of common colds in adults worldwide.”
Other coronaviruses cause the diseases known as SARS, which no longer appears to be circulating in human populations, and MERS, which is still active in the Middle East.
It is hard to contain diseases caused by a coronavirus because they can live in animal populations and re-emerge at a later time.
Officials suspect that COVID-19 appeared in the Wuhan area of central China because of thriving “wet markets” for meat and live animals there, which encourage the spread of viruses and bacteria between species.
The best way to protect yourself from the possibility of getting COVID-19 is the same way we protect ourselves from the flu, say health officials:
■Wash your hands regularly with soap and water
■Stay home when you are sick
■Cover your cough