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Following is a transcript of the remarks made by the Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food, Dr Yeoh Eng-kiong, at a stand-up briefing session this afternoon (March 17):
Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food: First I want to, I got a lot of figures here, we give you the actual details of the figures later, but just to give you a general number. We will be updating you today with all the figures of the cases. In particular, we just want to update the figures in the Prince of Wales [Hospital] because in the Prince of Wales, we have been able now to get a clue as to the patient who was originally admitted that we suspect is the one that brought in the virus to the hospital. So the experts, the Department of Health and the hospitals have now highly suspected one particular individual who was brought into the hospital who at the time did not have any obvious signs of pneumonia. We have now come to a very high index of suspicion that it is this particular patient. So with that identification of that individual, we are now able to ascertain that the cluster of individuals that were associated with this individual, the relatives, contacts etc. The other figures we would also be confirming today would be a group of medical students, because medical students are in Prince of Wales, they have been around in all the wards and a number of them, of course, have come down with pneumonia. So the figures we have for the Prince of Wales, the number is that, another now 45 individuals that we are qualifying.
Reporter: That are new?
Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food: No, these are not new cases. These were cases that had been held under observation. So I just want to clarify these are not new cases not known to us. These are cases known to us but because we were not able to verify the source, the investigation had not been completed, but they have been in the hospital because these were some of the relatives that visited the index patient, the person that we suspect carried the virus.
Reporter: Relatives of hospital staff as well?
Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food: Relatives of the patient. And then we also confirmed the medical students as well, because the medical students have been in the wards, and a number of them also got pneumonia. So there are 45 additional individuals which we suspect, of which we now have 40 with pneumonia. We only have one additional case - remember there are four clusters - from the other cluster and that's the Pamela Youde Eastern Hospital cluster. Remember that yesterday we had six patients that were under observation in Pamela Youde Eastern Hospital, six with pneumonia. Today that cluster is at seven. So we have seven patients in Pamela Youde Eastern Hospital with pneumonia. So for the other three clusters the numbers are stable. For the Prince of Wales, as I said, we now have figures relating to these additional 45 individuals, with 40 with pneumonia, of which 16 that we are suspecting of carrying this infection are medical students. The additional 16 are medical students. Of these medical students, 15 have pneumonia. Then we also have, just now I mention about the relatives, we suspect that 23 of the relatives and visitors to the relatives, close contacts of the patients, we suspect 23 have the infection and of these 22 have pneumonia. So in the total numbers, you can see that we have now in total 95 that are under observation and 83 with pneumonia.
(Please also refer to the transcript in Chinese)
End/Monday, March 17, 2003
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