“It is a new disease,” he added. “There could be a vaccine in the future, but right now it is still in the research stage.”
Last week, he said, several Chinese individuals visited an immunization clinic on island and asked for pneumococcal conjugate vaccine or PCV 13 or pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine or PPSV23.
Both vaccines help protect people against pneumococcal diseases.
“We can help them with those vaccines, PCV13 and PPSV23, but there is no specific shot for 2019-nCoV, and those two vaccines cannot protect someone from novel coronavirus,” Sasamoto said.
The New York Times reported on Monday that the “mayor of Wuhan [in China] which is at the center of the viral outbreak, said on Sunday that there could be about 1,000 more confirmed cases of the mysterious illness in the city — a sign that China’s monumental efforts to halt the disease may only just be starting.”
As of Monday morning, the NYT added, “the official count of confirmed cases across China stood at 2,744. The authorities in Hubei Province put the death toll at 76 there, bumping the overall deaths to at least 80.”
In the U.S., “three more cases of the coronavirus were reported on Sunday: two in California and one in Arizona, bringing the country’s total to five, according to the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]. All three had recently been in Wuhan, health officials said. The three patients were all being kept in isolation.” (See related story in today’s edition’s regional news.)
