New study an eye-opener on how coronavirus is spreading and how little we knowA study published Friday in the medical journal JAMA found that 41% of the first 138 patients diagnosed at one hospital in Wuhan, China, were presumed to be infected in that hospital.
This is big news. In plain English, it means that nearly half of the initial infections in this hospital appear to have been spread within the hospital itself. This is called nosocomial transmission. (Doctors use big words to hide bad things: Nosocomial means caught it in the hospital.)
What's more, most spread doesn't appear to have been the result of a so-called "super-spreader event," in which a single patient transmits infection to many other people. In these events, a procedure such as bronchoscopy -- where a doctor inserts a tube into the patient's lungs -- can result in many infections.
This would be a concern, but not nearly as much as what appears to have happened: Many health care workers and many patients got infected in many parts of the hospital. What's more, since there's a broad spectrum of infection and only patients who were sick were tested, it's quite likely that there was even more transmission in the hospital.
So, like SARS and MERS -- other coronaviruses -- before it, the Wuhan coronavirus is spreading in hospitals................
https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/08/health/coronavirus-hospital-infections-frieden/index.html
