Experts revealed important details about the Hungarian coronavirus situation

Half of coronavirus infections occur before the onset of symptoms, so asymptomatic infections play an important role in the dynamics of the epidemic, said Dr. Zsófia Bognár, infectologist at the National Center for Public Health (NNK), at a recent scientific meeting of the Hungarian Zoonoses Society (MZT), the NNK and the National Office for Food Chain Safety (NÉBIH), according to medicalonline.hu. The proportion of asymptomatic patients today can be 40%, according to Bognár.

Patients with mild or asymptomatic symptoms do not become infected after eight days, but in severe cases, the ability to transmit the virus can take up to three weeks. Asymptomatic and presymptomatic patients have the same viral copy number, but the latter have a 75 percent infectivity rate compared to asymptomatic, the NNK expert explained.

While the epidemic “didn’t say much” in some counties during the first wave, today the number of infected people is increasing everywhere, with the highest proportion of people aged 20-29. 18% of those over 65 are affected and 3.1% of those under 15 are affected. There have been no deaths yet in the 20-29-year-old age group, but Zsófia Bognár warned that the increase in the number of cases will be followed by an increase in the number of daily deaths within a few weeks, the newspaper writes.

60% of those treated in the intensive care unit died

The hospitalization rate increased 24 percent in the first two weeks of September. In spring, half of those infected were treated in the hospital, since in the first two weeks of the epidemic the procedure required institutional care in all cases. Of the patients seen in the hospital, 9.1 percent of the patients required intensive care.

25.6% of patients requiring institutional treatment and 60% of those in intensive care have died.

6.2 percent of healthcare workers were infected with a coronavirus in mid-September, according to data from NNK. In July, this proportion was 16 percent in Hungary, which is lower than the number detected in Europe in May, when 23 percent of cases came from health professionals.

We got the tests wrong

Although the number of tests carried out has also started to increase in Hungary, according to Zsófia Bognár, we are not in the right place in Europe in terms of the number of tests per 100,000 inhabitants, only Slovenia, Croatia, Slovakia and Bulgaria carry out fewer tests.

It was not even spring, and now there are not enough reagents, the nucleic acid extraction kit is in short supply, the plastic items for the PCR machines have run out, because the production capacity simply cannot meet the needs.

– explained the reasons for the low number of tests Zoltán Kis, the leader of the NNK Covid team, mentioning that there was a bottleneck in the spring of the sampling devices. There are few specialists, so staff from other NNK departments were brought in to help with laboratory work. However, Zoltán Kis also drew attention to the fact that the lack of professional staff can cause problems.

Compared with the pharynx, the Sars-CoV-2 virus is present in greater numbers in the nose, so it is important that sampling is carried out at both points – explained Zoltán Kis in his presentation. There is chaos in the literature on how long asymptomatic infected people defecate the virus, which have included several studies, including asymptomatic and presymptomatic cases, lasting 10 to 30 days. However, it already seems clear that the virus has a higher copy number in the elderly, noted the head of NNK’s Covid team.

At Hospital László, about 50 percent of critically ill patients who recovered from the ventilator were cured, which is a good proportion in international comparison, shared the experience of the Chief Physician of the National Institute of Hematology and Infectious Diseases of the Central Hospital South Pest, dr. Lakatos Botond. Mortality is not expected in mild to moderate patients, but about 10 percent of seriously ill patients become critical and the death rate increases from there, the chief physician explained.

We do not take good actions on time, according to the expert

The figures are terribly worrying, said Ferenc Jakab, a professor at the University of Pécs. While in the first wave of the epidemic, the government took good action at the right time, this cannot be said now. – declared the head of the Coronavir Action Group of the Ministry of Innovation and Technology.

They also reported that an algorithm had been developed that would not only be suitable for network analysis but also for the detection of superdistribution events, but they did not have access to a sufficient number of samples to perform these studies and therefore could not make predictions. epidemiological.

The lack of capacity, according to the professor, may also be due to the fact that although the incubation time for Sars-CoV-2 is 1 to 14 days, the contact investigation will only begin after 48 hours. However, contact discovery should start as soon as possible.

He stressed that in an epidemic situation, it would not be possible for a person subject to quarantine to receive a release decision and a red sign warning of home quarantine on the same day.

The death toll will also rise in Hungary

By influencing the four factors that determine the breeding number, we can inhibit the spread of the epidemic. Gergely Röst, an epidemiologist with the ITM Task Force, has already spoken about this. Reducing the number of daily contacts was the strategy in the first wave, however, strict restrictions cannot be maintained in the long term, so the probability of transmitting the infection can now be reduced by using a mask, hand washing and distance. Social.

Already in the spring, the ITM task force indicated that the key to managing the epidemic is to identify asymptomatic and mild symptomatic cases that will drive the second wave of the epidemic. In June, following the detection of an increase in the number of contacts, an explosive increase in the number of infected people was forecast at the end of August, and in the first half of the last month of summer, the number of reproduction increased above one. Gergely Röst also warned that contact matrices predict that the Florida effect will also occur in Hungary, that is, the increase in the number of cases will be followed by an increase in the number of deaths five weeks later.

There is no opposition between proper management of the epidemic and safeguarding the farm’s viability, the expert noted. Second-quarter GDP data shows that countries that performed well in controlling the epidemic were more economically successful.

We can see a significant correlation between the epidemic situation and economic performance, but this is not the only factor: where the epidemic situation was bad, stricter closures should be made, which lasted longer, so the declaration of Gergely Röst is undoubtedly correct, but also with little weight) than the structure of the economy. Open economies, where the weight of tourism was greater and industrial production is characterized by pro-cyclical sectors, have been more affected than countries that depend less on tourism or export to post-cyclical or counter-cyclical sectors.

The first and second waves of the domestic epidemic differ demographically and also in other aspects – said Zsófia Bognár in her presentation, who emphasized the importance of social communication. He believed that, instead of intimidation, young people should be encouraged to take an active part in alleviating the epidemic and protecting the elderly and people at risk through the use of masks and adherence to hygiene rules of hands and social distance.

(via Medicalonline)

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