To date there have been 134-cases reported in China, 43 of which have resulted in death. Although originating in Jiangsu there is one case reported in Taiwan without loss of life (my case numbers include known asymptomatic cases). The most recent onset confirmation occurred on 10 July in Hebei Province. The previous onset confirmation was 59-days previously from Beijing. The last fatality confirmation was on the 26 July via Xinhua.
To date 31.9% of all known cases have been fatal, close to a 1/3rd of all cases. For context the Case Fatality Rate of SARS was 10.9%.
The Ministry of Health and Chinese media confirmed that to July there were 85 patient discharges which equates to a Case Recovery Rate of 63% (with every chance for a slight improvement). Asymptomatic cases remain at one (0.7%).The map in Shane's post is a reminder that this weekend's case is an outlier, geographically as well as seasonally. Hebei province almost surrounds Beijing, and if memory serves, that's where the father of Beijing's first case purchased the birds he hoped to sell in the capital.
Langfang, the city where the 61-year-old woman contracted H7N9, is no rural backwater. Wikipedia tells us that it has a total population of 3.85 million. An hour's drive southeast of the Beijing airport, it's part of the Beijing-Tianjin corridor, with no fewer than 30 universities and an economy based on computer technology. Another city in the corridor is Tangshan, which in 1976 suffered a catastrophic earthquake that effectively ended the Maoist regime and paved the way for over 30 years of explosive economic growth that changed the world.
My point is that the poor woman in critical condition in Chaoyang Hospital is not some faceless nonentity; she's a real live human being, as real as everyone living between, say, New York and Boston or Seattle and Vancouver, or Riyadh and Jeddah. If she dies it will be a real death, not just a pixel or two winking out on a screen.
She does have some advantages, including a medical system primed and ready for her (imagine the panic if an H7N9 case turned up in Los Angeles or London). But she is still just a real human being. Statistically she may be one of the unluckiest people on the planet, but she's a real person with a name and a family, and that is why we should all care about her fate.
