Originally Posted by
ORAC
[. . .]
Forty health care workers were infected with the novel coronavirus by patients at a single Wuhan hospital in January, a new study has found, underscoring the risks to those at the frontlines of the growing epidemic.
One patient who was admitted to the surgical department was presumed to have infected 10
health care workers, according to the paper that was authored by doctors at the Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University and published in the
Journal of the American Medical Association (
JAMA) on Friday.
Seventeen patients who were hospitalized for other reasons also became infected by the coronavirus. A total of 138 patients got the virus in a period spanning January 1 to January 28, with hospital-associated transmission accounting for 41 percent of all cases.........
[. . .]
The example of the patient presumed to have infected 10
health workers highlighted the high level of danger within hospitals during the first phase of the epidemic, even though overall it is currently estimated that each patient infects on average 2.2 others.
This isn't surprising or unusual in the context of other outbreaks of novel infectious diseases. The 2019-nCoV virus was only identified in Wuhan in early January. By that time, any number of transmissions by carriers -- symptomatic and asymptomatic -- to others would have occurred, probably more in-hospital than in most other places. And it takes time (often longer than it should) for hospitals and other providers and public health authorities to ramp up infection control measures.
It would be more surprising if there had not been a burst of hospital-acquired cases.
"If true, then this confirms that some
patients are likely to be far more infectious than others, and this poses further difficulties in managing their cases," said Michael Head, a global health expert at the University of Southampton said in a comment to the UK's Science Media Centre.......
Also typical of infectious viral diseases. Different patients, and patients at different stages of incubation and symptomatic illness, shed virus particles at varying rates and quantities. Since it really isn't possible in clinical settings to determine who might be "more infectious than others," the same isolation and infection control measures really apply to all cases, so the "further difficulties" comment doesn't make much sense. There might be additional risk in some cases, but usually no one knows that in real time.