For those skeptical about the numbers from China......
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A spate of mysterious second-time infections is calling into question the accuracy of COVID-19 diagnostic tools even as China prepares to lift quarantine measures to allow residents to leave the epicenter of its outbreak next month. It's also raising concerns of a possible second wave of cases.
From March 18-22, the Chinese city of Wuhan reported no new cases of the virus through domestic transmission — that is, infection passed on from one person to another. The achievement was seen as a turning point in efforts to contain the virus, which has infected more than 80,000 people in China. Wuhan was particularly hard-hit, with more than half of all confirmed cases in the country.
But some Wuhan residents who had tested positive earlier and then recovered from the disease are testing positive for the virus a second time. Based on data from several quarantine facilities in the city, which house patients for further observation after their discharge from hospitals, about 5%-10% of patients pronounced "recovered" have tested positive again.
Some of those who retested positive appear to be asymptomatic carriers — those who carry the virus and are possibly infectious but do not exhibit any of the illness's associated symptoms — suggesting that the outbreak in Wuhan is not close to being over.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsan...-then-positive
What I'm especially concerned about is shortage of staffing - not just vents. Like @ccmdfd mentioned, these patients are very sick and require a lot of attention and medical care beyond simply their vent settings.
Ventilators are simply a very stark go/no go bottleneck. If you're out of vents and a new patient needs one, there is no way that someone does not die unless they can be transferred somewhere else.
Live on the conference call now.
According to our division chief (outgoing president of ATS, the american pulmonary/critical care professional society), the Cornell Weill health system has 260 intubated COVID patients. 80 intubated COVID patients at NY Presby alone.
@ccmdfd
I’ll add just one more quote for those who don’t click the link:
In February, Wang Chen, a director at the state-run Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, estimated that the nucleic acid tests used in China were accurate at identifying positive cases of the coronavirus only 30%-50% of the time.
Lessons learned