SCRS in Guangzhou?
Hopefully Beijing will not try to be "creative" with its definitions and use the prior illness in March to obscure the fact that the patient has evidence of SARS CoV infection.
Taiwan's manipulations are still at their SARS website for all to see.
cdc.gov.tw
The started with 73 patients who died, had been classified as probable SARS because they had tested positive for SARS CoV. 36 of them were reclassified as non-SARS due to underlying conditions. However, the page linked above shows that of the 73, 22 had a coesiting medical disorder. Even if all 22 were reclassified, there would still be 14 patients who had died, were SARS CoV positive, had no documented co-existing condition, yet were removed from the probable SARS fatality list.
The classification acrobatics created some rather glaring problems. Those cases that were SARS CoV positive had a case fatality rate of 21.2%, while those that were SARS CoV negative had a case fatality rate of 33.8%. Thus the manipulated data managed to show that SARS CoV infection saved lives by lowering the case fatality rate from 33.8% to 21.1% (the web site the gets creative on the statistics side by dividing up the SARS CoV positive group into SARS and "SARS-related" groups which cuts the numerator in half, but conveniently leaves the denominator alone, thereby lowering the SARS case fatality rate to "10.7%" and the SARS-related rate to (10.4%).
Surprisingly, WHO allowed this manipulation to carry over to its web-site, which now shows just 37 fatalities in Taiwan.
This creative classification could be expanded elsewhere. The Amoy Gardens index case initially was positive for Influenza A. Thus, using Taiwan's creative approach, his pneumonia could be reclassified as the flu and the associated SARS CoV could be called a marker for the flu. The SARS CoV from the Amoy Gardens index case (CUHK-AG1) had a unique mutation profile, which was found in a high percentage of Amoy Gardens cases as well as Taiwan cases.
Hopefully, Beijing won't use these tricks to call the Guangzhou case a non-SARS case because of the prior March illness.
I noticed in the latest AP story, WHO mentions the word acute:
"She said antibody tests indicated "a likely viral infection but not necessarily...an acute SARS infection."
I thought it was odd that a 32 year old free-lance journalist would have pneumonia or a pneumonia-like disease twice in a 9 month period (several reports indicate he was a SARS suspect case in March)
Are the antibody data suggesting the patient has a Severe Chronic Respiratory Syndrome (SCRS)? |
