Dr. Jim Wilson updates his Current Map of Cholera-Affected Areas - Haiti: Operational Biosurveillance. Excerpt (his bolding):
•Case fatality rates such as the most recent Health Cluster report of 2.3% is representative of gross national level aggregation of information available to officials, which represents a substantial bias towards CTC/CTUs staffed by experienced teams such as MSF. What is not reflected is the continually documented "first contact" pattern of daily clinical mortality seen by rural communities and urban environments such as Gonaives several weeks ago reported by officials do not reflect the true impact of cholera at the community level. The daily mortality we have documented on multiple occasions may range from 10 to 100%. We often see sudden overwhelming of local capacity to the point of backloading corpses for burial, having run out of body bags.
•Conservative estimates therefore suggest more than a quarter-million cases of cholera in Haiti to-date, the majority of which were subclinical.
•In some areas of Haiti, we have confirmation that in-patient statistics are under-reported by as much as 400%. In many areas of Haiti, we are documenting outbreaks that are not being accounted for in the official statistics. We therefore estimate the upper bound of estimated total (subclinical and clinically apparent) case counts to be nearly one million. From a practical operations point of view, these estimates are academic. The bottom line is the epidemic continues to spread completely out of control.
