https://www.cbsnews.com/live/video/20200212142623-china-accused-of-censoring-coronavirus-data-outbreak-has-killed-more-than-1100-people/--------------------------
‘It’s the Pneumonia Everybody In China Knows About’ – But Many Deaths Will Never Appear In Official Coronavirus Figureshttps://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3050311/its-pneumonia-everybody-china-knows-about-many-deaths-will-neverRetired Wuhan factory worker Wei Junlan had always been in good health, but around two weeks after developing the first signs of a cough and fever, the 63-year-old was dead from what doctors suspect was the new coronavirus.
But her death on January 21 will not show up in official statistics about the outbreak – her death certificate listed her cause of death only as “heavy pneumonia”.
Her nephew Jerry Shang said she had not been tested for the disease, but the doctor said her symptoms – including a lung infection, fever and increasing weakness – closely matched those of Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.
By the end she was unable to walk, and the last the family saw of her was when she was being wheeled into the emergency room. The doctor told the family: “It’s the pneumonia that everybody around the country knows about.”
Local doctors have heard of many such cases and many Wuhan residents have complained that family members cannot get a proper diagnosis because frontline hospitals are overwhelmed in the face of high patient numbers and a shortage of supplies and testing kits.
Wei Peng, a community hospital doctor in the city, said medical staff were not allowed to list coronavirus as a cause of death when cases had not been confirmed and said later instructions had even banned them from listing pneumonia. Instead they can only write the immediate cause of a patient’s death, such as diabetes or organ failure.He also said the problem was compounded by the difficulty in getting some patients to hospital in time.
He gave the example of a woman whose father died at home because she did not have the strength to get him to her car and the ambulance was too busy to collect him, “Such patients die at home, nothing can be done, and they cannot be counted in the official numbers,” he said.Some patients, like Wei, have passed away without it ever being confirmed what had taken their lives.
China’s health authorities have admitted that the real number of Covid-19 cases is likely to be higher than officials statistics show.
“The mortality rate that we calculate at the moment, is for confirmed cases, there are cases with lighter symptoms or other scenarios not included in our statistics,” Jiao Yahui, an official with the National Health Commission, said at a press conference last week.
Wei also questioned the accuracy of the official figures for Covid-19 deaths and infections.
“As they updated the list of deaths, I kept checking for her name, but she was never among them,” he said. “After a while, they stopped publishing individual names.”The grief of those whose relatives have died at home is compounded by their confusion about what to do next and often they do not have time for proper goodbyes.
Li said the woman she was helping barely had time to deal with her husband’s death. The funeral home sent a car to pick up the body, but she did not know what to do with his bedsheets and clothes and was trying to concentrate on finding a hospital bed for her mother-in-law.
Another Wuhan resident, Xia Chengfang, was unable to say a proper farewell to her grandfather, who died on January 28.
“The hospital directly called the funeral home to cremate his body, we weren’t able to see him in the end. My mother and uncle picked up his clothing, drove far away from the crowds and burned it,” she said.
Funeral homes in the city have been working 24 hours during the outbreak. An employee from Wuchang Funeral Home named Huang told Tencent News recently that staff were working round-the-clock shifts and often only have a few minutes rest between jobs.
... After his aunt died, Jerry Shang said the family was not allowed to see her body or arrange the funeral.
Instead, the hospital collected patients’ bodies and arranged for a local funeral home to cremate them together.
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Coronavirus Still Stumps Experts On When Human Carrier Turns Infectioushttps://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3050327/coronavirus-still-stumps-experts-when-human-carrier-turns-infectiousIdentifying how long it takes before carriers start to spread the virus could prove key to curbing the spread of Covid-19
Researchers are trying to determine whether it can be transmitted before carriers start to show symptoms
A study published on Sunday by a team of Chinese researchers estimated the incubation period could last up to 24 days, much longer than the previous estimate of 14 days.
The group is led by Zhong Nanshan, a global authority on severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars), which was also caused by a pathogen from the coronavirus family.
Such a long incubation period would make it particularly difficult to prevent the spread of Covid-19 if infected individuals are contagious before showing symptoms.
Michael Osterholm, director of the Centre for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said it was possible it could be transmitted by people before they become ill and there were “striking parallels” between Covid-19 and the flu virus, which can infect others during the incubation period.
“The epidemiology screams ‘flu virus-transmission’,” he said.
...The potential for patients with mild symptoms to spread the disease was also raised by China’s National Health Commission at a press conference last week.
“If we can find these cases with atypical symptoms earlier, it will help control the spread of the virus,” Li Xingwang, from the commission’s expert panel, said.
... This is where high-quality diagnostic kits are crucial, according to researchers.Hong Kong University’s Nicholls said during in a conference call hosted by investment group CLSA last week, according to a transcript seen by the South China Morning Post:
... “When you talk about asymptomatic that means you have a good diagnostic test – where you can say they are asymptomatic – which we don’t have with this virus” ...
Media in China have criticised faulty tests that have produced large numbers of so-called “false negatives” in patients who were later confirmed to have the disease.For instance Li Wenliang, the Wuhan doctor named as one of the first whistle-blowers of the epidemic, received several negative test results before he was finally diagnosed on January 30, and died just over a week later.
“If we have a detection device, a diagnostic kit, we need it to be four things – quick, accurate, simple, and safe. The current assay [laboratory test] we are using so far, is still far away from those four,”
- Yi-Wei Tang, China chief medical officer - US-based company Cepheid.
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