faulker024

For the purposes of this discussion the current outbreak of H7N9 began November 1, 2016 and is still continuing. More than 460 human cases have been reported from China. Of these cases, 426 have symptom onset dates reported by the World Health Organization (WHO) for cases with onset before February 10, 2017. Graphing the symptom onset dates for these H7N9 cases provides a count of new daily infections of H7N9. Also included in the graph are the remaining 37 cases based on their reporting date rather than symptom onset date which is not available at this time for cases reported after February 11. The graph, an epidemic curve, shows that the greatest number of H7N9 infections occurred on February 1, 2017, based on a five day moving average. Even if The 37 cases for which symptom onset dates are not available are distributed over the 17 days following February 11, they are an insufficient number of new cases to exceed the five-day moving average which peaked above 10 cases per day on Feb...

Since November 2016, more than 460 human cases of H7N9 have been reported or imported from China. To put this number in perspective, confirmed cases of H7N9 were first reported in March 2013, four years ago. Of all the cases of human H7N9 infections reported to date, more than one-third (about 36%), have occurred in the last four months. This raises a concern that H7N9 is not only causing outbreaks in China but could lead to epidemics and perhaps even a pandemic. It is difficult to tabulate exactly how many H7N9 cases have occurred since November 1 of 2016, because case reporting and enumeration seem to vary among various public health reporting agencies. Media and blog reports have interpreted variation among these counts of H7N9 cases as a failure of public health officials in China to accurately track H7N9 cases, often leading to exaggerated claims of the rates of infection in China. It is possible to arrive at a close approximation of the actual number of recent cases by using dif...