Loading ...media so far this weekend…I haven’t seen any “it’s a nothing burger” coverage….I saw a # of stories about China covering up or not being able to get the real stats on deaths and infection numbers.
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Coronavirus outbreak: Death toll surpasses total from SARS outbreak
Opinion: New study an eye-opener on how coronavirus is spreading and how little we know
A study published Friday in the medical journal JAMA found that 41% of the first 138 patients diagnosed at one hospital in Wuhan, China, were presumed to be infected in that hospital.
This is big news. In plain English, it means that nearly half of the initial infections in this hospital appear to have been spread within the hospital itself. This is called nosocomial transmission. (Doctors use big words to hide bad things: Nosocomial means caught it in the hospital.)
What’s more, most spread doesn’t appear to have been the result of a so-called “super-spreader event,” in which a single patient transmits infection to many other people. In these events, a procedure such as bronchoscopy — where a doctor inserts a tube into the patient’s lungs — can result in many infections.
This would be a concern, but not nearly as much as what appears to have happened: Many health care workers and many patients got infected in many parts of the hospital. What’s more, since there’s a broad spectrum of infection and only patients who were sick were tested, it’s quite likely that there was even more transmission in the hospital.
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What we’re covering here
Coronavirus deaths: Another 89 people died in mainland China on Saturday, bringing the total death toll around the world to at least 813. The number of confirmed cases has risen to at least 27,100 in Hubei province alone, with the global number of infected now at more than 37,000 — the vast majority in mainland China.
SARS: The number of people killed by the novel coronavirus globally has now overtaken the total death toll for the SARS outbreak in 2003, which killed 774 peopleacross the world.