Sunday 28 April 2013

Welcome to the end of the fourth week of H7N9.

And what a week its been.

There are now 122 H7N9 lab confirmed cases including an asymptomatic boy and an imported (to Taiwan from China) case. The numbers have risen from around 108 to 125 and the deaths from 13 to 23. More people have been discharged from hospital as well and the Case Fatality Rate/Ratio is sitting fairly steady at around 19%. A comment was made that official case reports would only appear once per week, but Provincial/Municipal numbers seem to still be coming out. Much has been made about age and sex. 

In the cases this past week, older males have borne the brunt of H7N9 infection.

Holes keep appearing in the amount of data coming out about each patient and as I write this (its 10pm and FluTrackers have already added more cases) there are at least 14 missing dates of onset, 54 dates of hospital admission (granted, some were not admitted, but only a small number), 2 dates of discharge, a number of occupations and the date of 1 (?Jiangsu) fatality in a state of flux. 

Despite that, so far no new cases have been reported, that have a date of onset in Week 4. That will probably change with newer provinces coming online and the diagnostic lag still being 9 days on average (having remained at 8-9 days since Week #2).

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