Experts acknowledge China's key role in defeating virus

Throughout the current epidemic I have been awoken not by the usual traffic noise, which has obviously not been as voluble of late, but by the ping of a WeChat message on my iPad.

The reason why the message's arrival breaks the predawn silence is that it is from somewhere in a different time zone－California or, more often, Israel.

I, like many others, have been receiving daily analyses of the novel coronavirus pneumonia outbreak from Michael Levitt, professor of structural biology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, who has a tendency to move around somewhat.

He is best known for winning the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2013, along with Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel.

During this crisis, he has hit a new kind of fame for his extensive statistical work on the data being released by the Chinese authorities and the World Health Organization about the virus.

He has appeared on Chinese TV and done a number of media interviews. I myself caught up with him on the phone from Stanford last month and have been exchanging friendly messages ever since.

Why his work has attracted so much attention is that he was one of the first to observe that China was actually winning the war against the virus.

"Contrary to the prevailing world hysteria, the epidemic is almost all over in China," he says.

His latest analysis, which was released on Saturday, predicted that the final death toll from the virus in Hubei will be 3,200 with 120 deaths in the rest of China. Many fewer than some feared in a few dark days after Chinese New Year.

His forecasts have been lent weight by people on the ground such as Bruce Aylward, an epidemiologist who led an advance team from the World Health Organization to Wuhan, who said on Feb 24 in Beijing that China is the only country to have ever turned around a serious and large-scale outbreak.

Levitt is not an epidemiologist but a molecular biologist and one who specializes in computer modeling, which makes his analysis all the more unique. He once worked with the co-discoverer of DNA, Francis Crick.

He decided to track this virus because of a special interest in China. He married his Israeli second wife, Shoshan, a curator of Chinese art and who teaches Hebrew at Peking University, in Shanghai in March last year.

One thing he noted early was that there is a much higher death rate in Wuhan than elsewhere, where many were exposed to animal-to-human transmission from the wet market.

He believes the molecular structure of the virus becomes effectively "sugar-coated" when passed between humans and is less dangerous.

Levitt does not play down the seriousness of the outbreak in China or now elsewhere in the world.

Yet, he says there needs to be some proportion, pointing out someone over the age of 80 in the US has a 0.9 per cent of dying every month anyway.

"The death rate if you contract it (the virus) is 2 percent. I am 73 years old now and so I have got a similar rate of dying every year. That's life," he says.

Although he acknowledges that this crisis has hit China hard, he believes there will be a huge focus on developing drugs in China that can be used to fight infections such as this.

Although there is an international effort to come up with a vaccine for this virus, this is not where the big money is for Western pharmaceutical companies.

He says that it is anti-cancer drugs, particularly those for prolonging life, which are in demand by often wealthy patients.

"If you can extend somebody's life by a year, it is easily worth half a million dollars," he says.

He believes, therefore, that after the setback of this epidemic, it may be China which takes the lead in fighting pandemics.

Contact the writer at andrewmoody@chinadaily.com.cn