We discussed obviously what the risks were, but, of course, as you remember, in early January we didn't even know this was the coronavirus. Clearly it caused enough concern from our end just because there were some parallels with the SARS event that had emerged in late 2002 in Guangdong. We had some concerns given the parallels with SARS.
However, as more information became available, as soon as we knew this was a novel coronavirus, we did follow up directly with Dr. Tam and her office. Obviously, they were aware, but our concerns at that point were that we knew the last two novel coronaviruses, MERS and SARS, had killed a third and 10% of their patients, respectively. They have no known vaccines, no known effective antivirals.
A novel coronavirus means that the whole world is susceptible, and that's a lot of fuel for an outbreak, and it's in the middle of wintertime, which is when you have respiratory illnesses. Given the signal-to-noise ratio and the detection of this behind a whole background of febrile illnesses, that certainly caused us quite a bit of concern.
The last point I will make is that I believe it was on January 13 when the first case was reported in Bangkok. By the way, coincidentally, it was the top city that we had identified as being at risk. At that moment we knew this was not a few dozen cases. In order for there for cases to be showing up in a city of 11 million, we had to be dealing with hundreds, maybe even thousands of cases. That was really the moment we became quite concerned, but of course with emerging diseases, unfortunately, you learn as you go. You don't have all the answers and you have to make decisions as new information becomes available.