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toucana » January 28th, 2020, 4:32 am wrote: It is emphatically *not* correct to suggest the virus is only killing elderly people who might well have died anyway of seasonal pneumonia.
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Almost half of the 17 people killed by the Wuhan coronavirus
so far were aged 80 or over and most of them had pre-existing health problems, according to China’s health authorities. Children have been infected, but are not highly susceptible to the virus, they said.
Details of the fatalities released on Thursday showed the youngest person was 48 and the oldest 89.
All of those who died – 13 men and four women – were from the central province of Hubei, and treated in hospitals in its capital, Wuhan, where the outbreak began in December.
At least nine of those who died had pre-existing conditions such as diabetes, coronary artery disease and Parkinson’s disease. Eight were in their eighties, two in their seventies, five in their sixties and one man was in his fifties. The youngest woman was 48 and had a pre-existing condition.
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Super-spreaders were suspected multiple times by different experts and media. A widely believed super-spreader patient was reported to have infected 14 different members of medical staff. On 25 January, Gao Fu, the head of China's CDC denied such claims and "dismissed a media report" claiming this, according to an announcement made to the official Xinhua News Agency.[113] Earlier the same day, however, China Newsweek (operated by another official news agency, China News Service), citing an expert from Peking University, claimed that the aforementioned patient could be considered a super-spreader already, and criticised the hospitals involved for not having properly protected the staff who came in contact with the patient. China Newsweek also criticised the government's censorship, saying all doctors and nurses, except those in the fever clinic, have "basically nothing but a mask" to protect themselves.
Semi-log plot of confirmed cases and deaths indicates the epidemic is in an exponential phase.
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Most people who died from the new coronavirus appear to have been old, and many had pre-existing health problems, but Chinese government records list at least five victims under 60, with no prior medical issues detailed.
These potential “outliers” – aged 36, 50, 53, 55 and 58 – are a reminder that scientists are still racing to understand the nature and impact of the new disease as it spreads in China and around the world.
[...]
Cases recorded so far suggest most infections are not serious. “It appears that the majority of infected persons have mild symptoms, though a small proportion do develop breathing difficulties, including pneumonia,” said Ho, a specialist in respiratory epidemics. The question for experts is who might be susceptible to getting more seriously sick – and with many cases only recently recorded, how long it takes to identify cases that need more medical help.
[...]
many victims already suffered from illnesses including diabetes, heart problems, chronic bronchitis and other conditions. However there’s no explanation for the apparent “outlier” cases of relatively young victims, and no details as to why these cases have been made public.
But they do raise questions about whether some healthy people in middle age could be vulnerable to the disease. The youngest victim, aged 36, was of particular concern, experts said, because it was unclear what made him susceptible, and if it was something that could affect others.
“This 36-year-old is an enigma,” David Heymann, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told Time magazine. “We know that the majority of people who have died to date have co-morbidity and are elderly.”
Adding to the concerns is data showing that the disease spreads more easily than Sars, with some of those infected able to pass it on before they show symptoms.
A cluster of four cases in Germany appears to have originated with a single traveller who didn’t show any signs of illness until after she had left the country, a group of scientists warned in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine this week.
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Event Horizon » February 17th, 2020, 1:19 pm wrote:>The mortality rate in the general population due to COVID-19 is about 2%, but in infected hospitalised patients this figure rises to 20—22%.
“More than 80% of patients have mild disease and will recover, 14% have severe disease including pneumonia and shortness of breath, 5% have critical disease including respiratory failure, septic shock and multi-organ failure, and 2% of cases are fatal,” Tedros said in Geneva. “The risk of death increases the older you are.”
He said children were not suffering from Covid-19 in the same way as adults, and more research was needed to find out why. There were still gaps in understanding
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toucana » February 19th, 2020, 9:37 pm wrote:The coronavirus death rate is far below that of severe acute respiratory syndrome – SARS – a coronavirus that swept across China almost two decades ago. The SARS death rate was almost 10%, although fewer than 10,000 SARS cases were ever confirmed.
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