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Despite the photo op yesterday (link) the medical screening at the West Kowloon rail station in downtown Hong Kong is lax.
China pneumonia: Hong Kong authorities take low-key approach to passengers arriving in Hong Kong on Wuhan trains
Screening facilities at West Kowloon rail terminus appear to be bypassed by travellers disembarking from Wuhan services
Hong Kong activates ‘serious’ response level after outbreak of unidentified form of pneumonia, but health chief stands by checks at railway station
January 5, 2020
snip
Three members of staff, from an unknown agency, were standing at the end of the special lane – marked “travellers from Wuhan, please go this way” – but made no visible attempts to identify passengers who had embarked in the Hubei province city.
The South China Seafood Market is only 2 blocks from one of the largest rail stations in China - The Hankou Railway Station.
This rail station connects to the high speed train system and during the 2019 Spring festival - alone - the station saw 5.5 million passengers. link
"Hankou Station is a special station in Jianghan District, Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China. Railways include Beijing-Guangzhou Railway, Handan Railway and many other lines.
Design style: restored to the old European classical architectural style, consistent with the old Hankou railway station on the station road.
Direction of the main station building: Sit north to south.
Main function: Realize elevated waiting, divided into ordinary speed field, high speed field, mainly stopping trains from Shanghai to Hanrong, and also taking into account the Beijing-Guangzhou and Handan lines.
Ancillary works: Hankou Railway Station of Metro Line 2, North Square, North Station, and the underpass tunnel of Wuhan Second Ring Road Development Avenue. Status: Construction is about to start.
The train from Hankou to Dalian crosses the five economic areas of Central South, Central Plains, North China, West Liaoning Corridor, and Liaodong Peninsula. Business and travel are rushing and become the busiest golden line. Shanghai, Shenzhen, Lanzhou ... From south to north, Hankou Station has repeatedly expanded the "Shinkansen" for Wuhan development." link
If China was convinced that this was not a coronavirus of any kind, they would put out a statement that SARS has been excluded, and the panic level would drop by about 6 stages. They haven't. It's worth pointing out that South Korea reported a cluster of 55+ cases of atypical pneumonia last year (that ultimately was bacterial in origin) with much less panic because they announced right away that SARS was excluded.
Alternatively, if this was the 2003 SARS virus, having re-emerged from an animal reservoir (or a laboratory), it would be easy to detect. China had no problem admitting that a nurse in Beijing in April 2004 had contracted SARS, even though there was no obvious exposure. (It was later determined to be part of a chain of transmission resulting from a lab accident.) So that seems unlikely as well.
So to me, that means that they're getting some kind of conflicting test results. We know that at least one lab performed some kind of test on some kind of sample and found 4% homology to some gene of SARS-CoV. I am aware of two previous incidents of such conflicting lab results in the absence of infection with the 2003 SARS virus:
- In December 2003, a man in Guandong Province, China, picked up a rat in his apartment with a pair of chopsticks, opened a window and released the rat, and then used the chopsticks as normal without disinfecting them. He took ill several days later and was reported on December 27, 2003, as a suspect SARS case after a PCR positive. It took about eight days of further testing to determine that the man was infected with a SARS-like animal coronavirus, but not the global outbreak strain from earlier in the year. China eventually after the eight days of testing, declared this man a confirmed SARS case, despite the viral difference. Three more people in the province would be confirmed with this virus over the next few weeks. All recovered, none of them transmitted the virus to anyone, and all were officially counted as SARS cases.
- On August 14, 2003, a nursing home in British Columbia, Canada, reported a respiratory outbreak with about a dozen deaths in which multiple patients had tested positive for SARS. Once again, it took about 8 days of further testing in multiple international labs to confirm that the SARS positives were false, and that the test was cross-reactive to a human coronavirus that is common worldwide. These cases were ultimately discarded as SARS cases (despite weeks of later accusations in the international media).
So which case is it this time? I don't know. If they have the sequences from the December 2003 "SARS" cases, it would be interesting to see if tests for those sequences would be more conclusive that testing for the global outbreak strain. While the global outbreak strain is thought not to exist outside of laboratories, we know this other strain exists in animals in Southern China, and given the story above, at least one rat. It also might be that this strain is less transmissible H2H than the global outbreak strain.
A lot of people are worrying about wild game in the market as a source of zoonotic infection. I'm more concerned about rats, bats, and the general filth of the market.
I'd like also to see articles excluding known non-coronavirus possibilities, such as hantavirus, legionella, or histoplasmosis. If something else comes back positive, it's possible that the coronavirus result might be a background detection due to a human coronavirus. One other thought...has anyone tested for MERS? MERS might cause a weak cross-reaction with SARS tests, and would certainly cause such an outbreak.
We'll see what a few more days of lab testing will determine. We're only on day 4 or so since the first media report.
This new outbreak of a disease in People’s Republic of China reportedly exhibiting symptoms of viral pneumonia needs to tracked closely. The rapid increase in the number reported cases over the past few days should raise some alarm. The current reports suggest that the human cases have only resulted from animal-to-human transmission from a wet market in Wuhan in China.
The health officials in Hong Kong and Taiwan are taking precautions and monitoring people returning from the Wuhan region. Hong Kong and Taiwan are right to be concerned because China does not have a track record of providing timely information about infectious disease outbreaks.
The rise of fake videos and trolling confuses the breaking news and facts surrounding this outbreak. So far no deaths have been reported, but about 25% of the reported cases are critically ill.
We need to watch for additional cases, or clusters of cases, away from Wuhan. The time to start worrying is when there is confirmed human-to-human transmission or when medical personnel start to become infected.
I copied the last post on our news thread to start this discussion. It is open to the public and no one has openly connected the African Swine Fever epidemic to this outbreak.
[Exclusive] New virus of unknown pneumonia in Wuhan is likely to be transmitted from animals to the Hong Kong government, and it is planned to upgrade the epidemic prevention
Last Update: 01 04 00:20 / Settling Time (HKT): 0103 21:55
Unknown cause of pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan, but so far the local government has not announced the type of virus causing the disease. It is reported that the local virus that has caused the outbreak of unknown pneumonia is very likely to be a new species of coronavirus that jumps from animals to humans. Some experts in Hong Kong believe that the government should immediately upgrade the response level to the severe level in response to the great chance of a new species of coronavirus appearing in the Mainland. It is reported that the government has also formulated further measures to strengthen epidemic prevention, which will be announced today (4th).
...
It is reported that the Mainland has acquired the virus that caused Wuhan's unknown pneumonia this time. It is likely that a new type of coronavirus that jumps from animals to humans is not the same as SARS coronavirus. Some experts have analyzed that there have been severe animal-to-human virus outbreaks in South China, including bird flu and SARS coronavirus. This time, there is no outbreak of bird flu in Wuhan. The epidemic situation is related to markets that sell game. Animal-to-human coronavirus, but not exactly the same as SARS-CoV.
... https://hk.news.appledaily.com/local...00104/60448286
Last edited by Laidback Al; January 3, 2020, 09:08 PM.
Reason: changed thread title
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