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Simply put SARS doesn't tranmit very well, people can spend significant time around infected people and not become infected themselves, nobody else in that nurse's family got SARS and she was symptom positive and non-quarantined for quite a while.

You must have your head in the sand. People in isolation rooms in world class hospitals are infecting the staff who wear respirators, masks eye protection, and suits in negative pressure rooms. To say this disease is not highly contagious is moronic.

In China hospitals are being quarantined because the staff is being infected in large numbers. Do you really think they aren't careful having probably watched dozens die? This disease is a monster from the infection standpoint

I would hate to see a contagious disease.

People in isolation rooms in world class hospitals are infecting the staff who wear respirators, masks eye protection, and suits in negative pressure rooms.

I am going to have to place an account of this type in the 'hearsay' category.

MANY of the staff infected seem to have been infected when these types of procedures hadn't been put in place yet - or were BUT other persons on staff were infected BEFORE full protective methods had been called into play.

There are unsubstantiated rumors of horrific transmission but the fact is that the known infections of medical professionals were before SARS was properly identified in that hospital, or people who failed to follow proper protocol (a respirator isn't a cure all, and depending on how the disease transmits it might be completely meaningless). All you have to do is look at the numbers, SARS has been around for around 6 months, 3 of that basically undetected, in that time it has infected thousands of people in a dozen or so cities and killing hundreds. A standard flu outbreak that we see every single year in that same time period will have traveled around the world infecting millions and killing thousands.

You have to understand how contagions work, there's three important elements: how is it transmitted, how is it received, how many cells does it take to infect 50% of the time. Disease can be transmitted by exhalation, in snot, in sneezes, via blood, via mucus membranes (which makes them an STD), via feces and urine and some even come out in sweat; each disease has a couple of methods, each method has a different level of contagiousness. Diseases can then be received via pretty much that same list, one interesting thing to note is that just because a disease transmits via one method doesn't mean it can be received in that method, an exhaled disease might have to be received via blood polution; again each method has a different level of contagiousness and it drops if there must be a cross over from transmission to reciept. Finally you've got the pure number game, how many cells does it take to infect, Ebola is a 1 cell infect that's one of the reasons it's the single most dangerous disease on the planet, most illnesses take thousands and maybe millions of disease cells to infect a new person. These are important to keep in mind when judging how "well" SARS is overcoming certain defenses, if SARS isn't transmitted by inhaling it then respirators will not impede its progress. Given the story from the nurse in Toronto it would seem that SARS comes out in sweat, this isn't a highly effective transmission method though that might not be the only method. I haven't seen much on it's receipt method and I haven't seen anything on cell count. But, again, we can look at the raw numbers and we know this is not a highly infectious disease, so it's probably got a tough receipt method and/ or a high cell count to infect.

China has a crappy medical system, the GOOD hospitals are running with capabilities we had in the 50s, the fact that they haven't managed to contain it within their own hospitals shows just how backwards the nation really is. Look at Toronto, they completely screwed the pooch left a SARS patient in an emergency room for 12 hours where he had the opportunity to infect hundreds of people who already weren't terribly healthy in the first place (you don't find healthy people in emergency rooms). And yet once they actually collated their feces things are being contained, the new infection rate in Toronto is dropping and there's good reason to believe that SARS will have run it's course in Toronto in another 2 or 3 weeks. I think the Chinese are trying to be careful, but they don't know what they're doing and even if they do they don't have the proper equipment to do their job right.