The Hamburg social authorities admitted a mistake in the suspicion of an infection with the Marburg virus at Hamburg Central Station last week. It turned out that the contact details of passengers on an ICE train in which potentially infected people were traveling were not recorded, said an authority spokesman.
The social authorities thus contradicted an earlier statement that the contact details should have been recorded. The suspicion of that Virus was later shown to be unfounded.
Passengers could not be queried in time
Last Wednesday there was… Hamburg a medical student reported who had previously traveled from Rwanda with a companion. After he came into contact with a Marburg-infected patient there several times, he feared that he had been infected himself.
The health authorities assumed that the student had entered the Hanseatic city via Hamburg airport. It only became clear that he arrived there on an ICE train after the train arrived and the passengers got off at the main station. Accordingly, it could Federal Police do not record any contact details of the passengers traveling with you.
Instead, the contact details recorded came from passengers who later wanted to travel in the opposite direction to Frankfurt on the same train. The agency said the ICE had been cleaned, but not under the necessary decontamination conditions. That’s why the federal police had him stopped in Hamburg-Harburg.
The all-clear was only announced hours after the negative test
The medical student and his companion were later tested; the negative test results were available that night and were transmitted the following morning. According to the spokesman, if the tests had been positive, the authority would have been informed that night. Contact persons would then have been identified as quickly as possible using data from Deutsche Bahn and a public appeal.
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The fact that the public was only informed of the all-clear hours after news of the suspected virus caused irritation. The social authorities then announced that they would subsequently investigate the actions of all the bodies involved.
The virus cannot be transmitted through the air, so human-to-human transmission is rare. However, it is considered extremely dangerous: in previous outbreaks, between 24 and 88 percent of those affected died, according to the World Health Organization. There have been no cases in Germany for almost 60 years.
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The Hamburg social authorities admitted a mistake in the suspicion of an infection with the Marburg virus at Hamburg Central Station last week. It turned out that the contact details of passengers on an ICE train in which potentially infected people were traveling were not recorded, said an authority spokesman.
The social authority thus contradicted an earlier statement that the contact details should have been recorded. The suspicion of that Virus was later shown to be unfounded.
Last Wednesday there was… Hamburg a medical student reported who had previously traveled from Rwanda with a companion. After he came into contact with a Marburg-infected patient there several times, he feared that he had been infected himself.
