Coronavirus: severe cases up but ‘signs of faster diagnosis’ in China
- Chinese health expert says increase in more serious patients is not a sign of deadlier virus
- Assessment of new caseload at various sites needed to determine if outbreak has peaked, former WHO epidemiologist says
The number of new suspected cases dropped from 5,173 on Sunday and 5,072 on Monday to 3,971 on Tuesday, a total that remained unchanged on Wednesday night.
But the number of confirmed cases and severe cases jumped. On Tuesday, 3,887 new confirmed cases were reported nationwide, including 3,156 in Hubei. That total was higher than the 3,235 on Monday and the 2,829 on Sunday.
The number of new serious cases also rose, up from 315 on Saturday to 431 on Tuesday.
“You can tell from the latest figures that there is a significant drop in new suspected cases, one of the reasons is the improvement of our capability of diagnosis, so that we can confirm or rule out suspected cases,” National Health Commission spokeswoman Song Shuli said.
Li Xingwang, chief infectious disease specialist at Beijing Ditan Hospital, said the rise in severe cases was in line with the increase in confirmed cases, and did not indicate that the virus had become deadlier.
He said the number of deaths and severe cases had increasing significantly in Hubei, but the figures for suspected cases in the province had also dropped significantly.
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“It shows that Hubei has greatly sped up diagnosis,” Li said.
The public and the medical community is on the lookout for signs that China’s aggressive restrictions on the movement of millions of people will help stop the spread of the disease.
A number of high-profile Chinese specialists, including epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan and Gao Fu, head of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, have predicted that this Sunday could be the peak of the outbreak.
But Wang Chen, vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, reportedly said there was not enough information about infections at the community level to say when the peak would come.
David Heymann, the epidemiologist who led the World Health Organisation’s global response to the severe acute respiratory syndrome epidemic in 2002-03, said that new cases were an important sign of whether the epidemic was easing but that the assessment should be made by looking at different locations.
“That is not just one outbreak, there are different outbreaks. You have to keep your eye on different sites to determine if their activities [to control the spread of the disease] are successful,” Heymann said.
