The Chinese province at the center of the new coronavirus epidemic reported a record increase in deaths Thursday, bringing the total number to more than 1,300 people worldwide, as experts warn that the outbreak could “wreak havoc” in fewer countries. prepare

Hubei health officials announced 242 additional deaths and 14,840 cases of the virus, officially known as Covid-19, on Thursday morning, the most significant single-day increase since the start of the epidemic and nearly ten times the number of cases confirmed the day before…

The government explained that the increase is due to a change in the way cases are tabulated: the total will now include “clinically diagnosed cases” after an increasing number of residents complained about the difficulty of getting tested and deal with viruses

“Clinically diagnosed cases” are patients who have all of the symptoms of Covid-19, but who have not been scientifically proven or who died before their test. The hope is that more people can benefit from treatment that allows doctors to diagnose viruses.

Nearly 34,000 patients were hospitalized in Hubei, the central province of China, of which Wuhan is the capital, including 1,400 in critical condition. To date, 3,441 patients have recovered and been discharged.

Worldwide, the virus has infected more than 60,000 people, with the vast majority of cases in mainland China. Only two deaths have occurred outside of China.

Case number confusion

The massive increase in case numbers reveals complexity over how to diagnose the virus worldwide, particularly in central China, where residents with symptoms have expressed frustration that they have been unable to obtain treatment due to delayed diagnosis.

These delays could be significant, with reports of patients waiting up to a week for their results, as test kits were sent from Hubei to a laboratory in Beijing. While efforts have been made to speed up the process, scientific testing of samples is difficult and time-consuming, and allowing doctors to diagnose patients will enable many more people to receive treatment, even in several hospitals specially designed for a treat the virus in Wuhan.

Delays in testing are not limited to China. In the United States, the CDC currently requires that all potential samples be sent to their central laboratories for a complete examination.

In its referral to hospitals, the CDC also warns that “in the early stages of infection, the virus may go undetected.” However, he adds that if a person has symptoms but is harmful to Covid-19, the virus is probably not the cause of their illness.

Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, said in a U.S. Senate hearing on Wednesday that the tests were not being carried out aggressively enough and should be extended to cover more symptoms.

“I think we should be looking very aggressively to expand diagnostic screening right now, especially in communities where there has been a lot of immigration, where these epidemics could occur, to identify them early enough to be small enough to that we can intervene to prevent a further spread of the plague in this country, “he said.

Gottlieb told Singapore, which has now identified around 50 cases, to comment on the United States, which receives a similar number of travelers from China each year.

“On a statistical basis, there is no reason to believe that if Singapore has implants of this virus, we do not have any. We expect them to be identified sooner in Singapore” as an island densely populated, he said. “But that suggests, at least for me, that we probably have some community awareness right now that we haven’t identified yet.”

He also questioned the quality of the data leaving China, which many outside observers have done, and the dramatic change in the way cases are diagnosed, is unlikely to help.

“I don’t trust reports in China, and I also believe that China’s numbers reflect the most serious cases, so we have a biased view of the case fatality rate and its severity,” said Gottlieb.

Counting lighter or asymptomatic cases could lead to a significant drop in the fatality rate, he added, but “even a fatality rate of 0.2 or 0.5 could be catastrophic if it is highly contagious and spreads all over the world. ”

Speaking at the same hearing, Asha George, executive director of the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense, said China might be limited in its evidence and reports, rather than just “a lack of will on the part of China.” of the Chinese government to report. ”

In schools of public health, George said students learn to assume they don’t have complete data and to report cases they don’t know yet.

“We are often taught to multiply what they have told you seven or eight times. For each case that you see, there are seven or eight that you do not see,” he said. “It means we would see hundreds of thousands of cases. I think this is the scale at which we should plan.”