In der New York Times wird die neue Entwicklung der Fallzahlen auch aufgegriffen:
The sharp rise in reported cases illustrates how hard it still is to grasp the extent and severity of the coronavirus outbreak in China, particularly inside the epicenter, where thousands of sick people remain untested for the illness.
The authorities were confronted by so many people with symptoms — and such a shortage of kits to test officially for the virus — that they had to change the way the illness is diagnosed.
Hospitals in Wuhan, China — the largest city in Hubei Province and the center of the epidemic — have struggled to diagnose infections with scarce and complicated tests that detect the virus’s genetic signature directly.
Officials now seem to be including infections observed on lung scans alone. This shortcut will help get more patients into needed care, provincial officials said, but it also shows the enormous number of people who are sick and have not been counted in the official tally of the outbreak.
Die tatsächlichen Fallzahlen sind also weiterhin nicht absehbar, unter anderem einfach dadurch das man die Leute die krank sind nicht testen kann. Experten zum neuen Diagnosevorgehen:
The few experts to learn of the new numbers on Wednesday night were startled.
“We’re in unknown territory,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
Doctors in China probably don’t have the chemicals necessary to perform complicated testing, and perhaps insufficient numbers of technicians, he speculated.
But lung scans are a perilous means to diagnose patients. Even patients with seasonal flu may develop pneumonia visible on a lung scan. “They’re talking about using this as another diagnostic test, but we haven’t seen it validated by data,” Dr. Schaffner said.
A social media campaign started by a physician in Wuhan last week called for using CT scans to simplify the screening of patients suspected of having the coronavirus and accelerate their hospitalization and treatment, instead of waiting for test results.
CT scans produce immediate results, she said, and Wuhan was running short of testing kits.
The change in diagnosis may make it harder to track the epidemic, said Dr. Peter Rabinowitz, co-director of the University of Washington MetaCenter for Pandemic Preparedness and Global Health Security.
“It makes it really confusing right now if they’re changing the whole way they screen and detect,” he said. Now estimating the scale of the epidemic “is a moving target.”
Nach der WHO kann sich die Situation noch in jede Richtung entwickeln. Die Zahlen sind durch das Vorgehen der chinesischen Behörden nicht aussagekräftig:
...“This outbreak could still go in any direction,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said on Wednesday.
It is not uncommon for scientists to refine diagnostic criteria as their understanding of a new disease changes. But when the criteria are changed, experts said, it makes little sense to continue to make week-over-week comparisons.
“It sounds simplistic, but it’s so very important — what numbers are you counting?” said Dr. Schaffner, the infectious disease specialist.
...
Die leichte/schnelle Übertragbarkeit des Virus ist ein Problem:
Clusters of cases that have emerged in an apartment building in Hong Kong, a ski chalet in France and a department store in eastern China suggest the new coronavirus spreads quickly and in ways that are not entirely understood.
In Hong Kong, people living 10 floors apart were infected, and an unsealed pipe was blamed. A British citizen apparently infected 10 people, including some at the ski chalet, before he even knew he was sick.
In Tianjin, China, at least 33 of 102 confirmed patients had a connection of some sort with a large department store.
Hier auch noch mal interessant der Fall wo sich jemand angesteckt hat, obwohl er mehrer Stockwerke entfernt von einem Infizierten wohnt.
Es folgt auch noch mal die Befürchtung was passieren könnte, sollte der Virus in einem Land wie dem Kongo ausbrechen würde.
Abschließend heißt es von einem Epidemiologen der Universität von Kalifornien:
“We’re in the dark in terms of knowing what to expect next.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/health/coronavirus-cases-china.htmlMan kennt immer noch nicht das wahre Ausmaß und was als nächstes zu erwarten ist.
Definitv keine Voraussetzungen dafür das die Situation bald eingedämmt wird.
