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Wuhan's coronavirus arrived in Spain stopping in Germany, in circumstances that the health authorities follow with special attention.

According to Fernando Simón, director of the Coordination Center for Health Alerts and Emergencies of the Ministry of Health, on Saturday, the spread of the virus that began in Bavaria, after a Chinese citizen imported the pathogen on a work trip, is being studied more carefully for the "atypical" of the case.

The event, said the person in charge of Alerts and Emergencies, has already generated seven or eight secondary infections , a situation "rare" since, in general, with this type of virus an index case does not usually produce more than two or three infections .

" This means that we have to follow it carefully . With what we learn here, we can assess situations in other countries," said Simon, who suggested that in this transmission of the virus there could have been particular circumstances. One of them is the possible intervention of what are called virus super transmitters .

"In different epidemics due to different pathogens, it has been shown that there are people with greater capacity to infect others , who transmit viruses more easily," explains Ángel Asensio, head of the Preventive Medicine service at the Puerta de Hierro University Hospital in Madrid.

They are people who, for different reasons, have the ability to spread the pathogens far superior to that of the affected medium, agrees Antoni Trilla, head of the Preventive Medicine and Epidemiology service of the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona.

"The specialists use a parameter called basic reproductive number to refer to the average number of people who can get a certain virus," continues the Dean of the University of Barcelona. There are pathogens, such as measles, with an average spread of 14 people; and others, such as the new coronavirus, which usually reach two or three people, seem to be a transmission that is already considered relatively important.

However, "we know that there are people who have the ability to spread many more people than the average indicates ."

Studies have not yet been able to determine for sure what makes a person a super transmitter , say Asensio and Trilla.

For example, it seems clear that people with a more advanced infection are more likely to spread the disease to those around them. But it is believed that there are also certain biological and genetic characteristics that give those who carry them a greater capacity to spread pathogens.

Trilla recalls several cases of supercontailers (super spreaders is the term they are known in English) that, to a large extent, contributed to the spread of an infectious outbreak.

A patient from South Korea transmitted the MERS - another 'relative' coronavirus of the newly identified - to 82 people in three days of visits to different health centers . "33 patients, 8 health workers and 44 visitors were infected," says Trilla, who recalls that this figure accounted for almost half of the total 186 affected by the 2015 outbreak.

It is not yet clear whether one of these profiles has intervened in German contagions and which of those involved - the Chinese citizen or one of the first affected - could be the key, but the investigation continues.

"Knowing in advance who can be a super transmitter could be very useful to better contain outbreaks, " the experts stress. "But, unfortunately, we still don't know how to do it."

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