China reports 14,840 new virus cases, 242 more deaths
The news seemed to be positive: The number of new coronavirus cases reported in China over the past week suggested that the outbreak might be slowing — that containment efforts were working. Stocks ticked upward in the United States, as some analysts declared it safe again to invest in companies that depend on China.
But Thursday, officials added more than 14,840 new cases to the tally of the infected in Hubei province alone, bringing the total number to 48,206 — the largest one-day increase recorded. The death toll in the province rose to 1,310, including 242 new deaths.
The sharp rise in reported cases illustrates how hard it still is to grasp the extent and severity of the coronavirus outbreak in China, particularly inside the epicenter, where thousands of sick people remain untested for the illness.
The authorities were confronted by so many people with symptoms — and such a shortage of kits to test officially for the virus — that they had to change the way the illness is diagnosed.
Hospitals in Wuhan — the largest city in Hubei province and the center of the epidemic — have struggled to diagnose infections with scarce and complicated tests that detect the virus’s genetic signature directly.
Officials now seem to be including infections observed on lung scans alone. This shortcut will help get more patients into needed care, provincial officials said, but it also shows the enormous number of people who are sick and have not been counted in the official tally of the outbreak.
The few experts to learn of the new numbers Wednesday night were startled.
“We’re in unknown territory,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Doctors in China probably don’t have the chemicals necessary to perform complicated testing, and perhaps insufficient numbers of technicians, he speculated.
But lung scans are a perilous means to diagnose patients. Even patients with seasonal flu may develop pneumonia visible on a lung scan.
“They’re talking about using this as another diagnostic test, but we haven’t seen it validated by data,” Schaffner said.
A social media campaign started by a physician in Wuhan last week called for using CT scans to simplify the screening of patients suspected of having the coronavirus and accelerate their hospitalization and treatment, instead of waiting for test results.
CT scans produce immediate results, she said, and Wuhan was running short of testing kits.
The change in diagnosis may make it harder to track the epidemic, said Dr. Peter Rabinowitz, co-director of the University of Washington MetaCenter for Pandemic Preparedness and Global Health Security.
“It makes it really confusing right now if they’re changing the whole way they screen and detect,” he said. Now estimating the scale of the epidemic “is a moving target.”
The news is the latest in a set of confusing data points suggesting the epidemic is far from contained.