# 5693
The number of new scarlet fever cases being reported in Hong Kong remains high, but has slowly decreased over the past several weeks, and today the Centre for Health Protection is calling it `High, but stabilized’.
You can see the trend in this graphic from today’s (Jul 14th) edition of Hong Kong’s Communicable Disease Watch.
A couple of excerpts from today’s report:
As of July 9, a total of 831 SF cases have been recorded so far this year, compared to 187 and 128 cases in the whole year of 2009 and 2010, respectively. The weekly number of newly reported cases seems to have peaked at week 26 (week ending June 25) and has decreased for 2 consecutive weeks since then. In the week ending July 9, 120 reports of new cases were received. There were no new fatal cases since the two deaths reported on May 30 and June 19, 2011, respectively. The case fatality rate stood at 0.2% to 0.3%, which is comparable with literature findings.
Continued vigilance against SF is vital because even though the daily number of newly reported cases seems to have stabilized, it remains almost ten times above the normal baseline.
