Seven victims of mystery pneumonia stayed on same floor of Hong Kong hotel

CBC ^ | 03-19-03 | Margret Wong

[tracer]

Better they should have stayed in beds.....

[CathyRyan]

becase = because

[aristeides]

Two of the three people who brought the disease to Singapore had stayed at the Metropole Hotel in Hong Kong: Shopping trip for 3 turned horribly wrong .

[aristeides]

Patients in Frankfurt doing better: German doctors say condition of Singapore doctor and wife with mystery disease improving .

[Pipe Dog]

I just had a thought about sickly Chinese factory workers coughing and sneezing on the assembly line, wrapping up all those germs in boxes and plastic and sending them on their way to Wal-Mart.

[Domestic Church]

Airborne! Yikes!

[Domestic Church]

We don't know if any of the cleaning crew have been affected. What are they odds they all got it from the elevator buttons on that floor (But no one else contacted it from the elevator buttons on the interior of the elevator?...AIRBORNE.)

[RLC]

Maybe the cleaning crew for that floor brought it in.

[Domestic Church]

"The staff would have been explosed more than a guest would if it were air. Curious."

Perhaps the air in the hallway isn't circulated and the heat/CA in each room has its own contained air flow unit with an external vent option. Many motel chains have a similar set up. That way if the heating/cooling breaks down it doesn't affect all the rooms.

[Jim Noble]

The hotel story is interesting, alright.

There was a new paramyxovirus of horses in Australia in 1994 that incidentally killed a few humans.

That a novel paramyxovirus would evolve in Southern China is not at all surprising (what took so long?). Other paramyxoviruses are quite contagious, as this one also appears to be. I wonder about the air-handling in the hotel.

My index of suspicion for BT is very, very low.

[CathyRyan]

None of the 200 to 300 workers at the hotel has become ill

[CathyRyan]

With that set up would the air from one roon flow to the next room?

[CathyRyan]

None of the 200 to 300 workers at the hotel has become ill. Would you have a cleaning crew for just one floor? Typhoid Mary?

[Diddle E. Squat]

What about intentional introduction to that floor, such as coating a doorknob/elevator button/etc.? Is it possible an act like that could occur and infect guests, say applied in the evening, but losing its potency over a short period time, thus explaining why no staff were infected? Similarly perhaps an aerosol release that affected persons who came in contact with its limited time of potency?

[Mother Abigail]

Thats thinking outside the box..

LOL

[Mamzelle]

re: Given the extent to which medical staff has gotten this disease, the med professor probably caught it treating somebody in Guangdong, where there was an outbreak of the disease in February. )))

"bears repeating" bump

[Mother Abigail]

However it is a common practice to assign housekeepers their own floor...

[Morrigan]

Maybe the one guest was infected and the staff passed the virus around......cross contamination.

[Morrigan]

I just had another thought....could it be possible to carry the virus but not be infected by it?

[Domestic Church]

"None of the 200 to 300 workers at the hotel has become ill"

I have a hard time believing that.