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Within three to five days in Wuhan, four family members gradually developed symptoms such as fever, cough, fatigue and diarrhea. On their return home, they were diagnosed with 2019-nCoV based on a viral analysis and lung scan.

The 10-year-old boy’s lungs were also scanned “on the insistence by the nervous parents” and showed signs of infection, which was confirmed by swabs of the back of his nose and throat. That meant he was capable of transmitting the virus even though the kind of tests used in airport screening for the virus would not identify him as a carrier.

Photo by EMILIA/REUTERS

Unexpected Finding

It was “a rather unexpected finding,” Yuen and colleagues wrote. Yet it doesn’t come as a complete surprise to doctors in China trying to unravel the means and ways the new virus is spreading.

“Children and infants’ symptoms are comparatively mild, while older people have more severe symptoms, as of our findings so far,” Feng Zijian, deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters Wednesday.

“One of the worrying things is the walking pneumonia and especially the younger kids in whom you don’t get as much of an immune reaction,” said John Nicholls, a clinical professor of pathology at the University of Hong Kong and part of the research team that isolated and characterized the SARS virus.

As more cases of the new coronavirus appear around the world, doctors and medical research teams are rushing to try to develop a vaccine or treatments that could prevent its spread. But, as in the SARS outbreak, the most effective methods are thought to be in identifying and isolating patients soon after infection, and then tracing and isolating their potential contacts.