www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/reporters-notebook-life-and-death-in-a-wuhan-coronavirus-icu
Reporter's Notebook: Life and death in a Wuhan coronavirus ICU
As the contagion spread and flooded his ICU, the doctor observed that three weeks seemed to determine the difference between life and death. Patients with stronger immune systems would start to recover in a couple of weeks, but in the second week, some cases would take a turn for the worse.
In the third week, keeping some of these acute patients alive might require extraordinary intervention. For this group, the death rate seems to be 4 per cent to 5 per cent, Dr Peng said.
And
As of Jan 28, of the entire hospital's medical personnel, only 40 have been infected. This is way less compared with other hospitals in terms of percentage of total medical staff.
(its the hospital in the Journal mentioned above - and they think the staff are less infected)
And
Based on my clinical observations, this disease is highly contagious, but the mortality rate is low. Those that progressed into the life-threatening stage often occurred in the elderly already with chronic diseases.
And
Some experts argue that the virus triggers a cytokine storm, which ravages the stronger immune system of young adults. Eventually excessive inflammations caused by cytokine result in the higher mortality rate. Have you seen such a phenomenon in the coronavirus outbreak?
Peng: Based on my observations, a third of patients exhibited inflammation in their whole body. It was not necessarily limited to young adults. The mechanism of a cytokine storm is about whole-body inflammation, which leads to a failure of multiple organs and quickly evolves into the terminal stage. In some fast-progressing cases, it took two to three days to progress from whole-body inflammation to the life-threatening stage
And
The deputy director of our department told me one thing, and he cried too. Wuhan 7th Hospital is in a partnership with our hospital, South Central Hospital. The deputy director went there to help in their ICU. He found that two-thirds of the medical staff in the ICU were already infected. Doctors there were running "naked" as they knew they were set to be infected given the shortage of protective gear. They still worked there nonetheless. That was why ICU medical staff were almost all sickened. It is too tough for our doctors and nurses.
So 3 weeks duration of illness generally. 4 to 5 death rate amongst seriously ill (they have not even counted mild infections in this calculation so it's not an overall death rate anywhere near that high - just an absence of data), overall most people do recover, the lack of medical protection is severely hampering care and exposing health care workers to infection particularly at moments where there is high risk of infection.
Interview is eye opening.