Replies to post #20679 on The Rising Influence of Rising Affluence

[DewDiligence]

No data from China should be accepted at face value (IMO).

[biocqr]

The coronavirus questions that scientists are racing to answer

https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/28/the-coronavirus-questions-that-scientists-are-racing-to-answer/

Chinese health authorities said over the weekend they’ve recorded cases where transmission occurred before the transmitting person showed symptoms. If that’s a common feature of this infection, it’s going to cause serious problems.

With some viral illnesses — like influenza for example — people can actually start infecting the people around them a day or two before they start to feel sick. That’s insidious, because it means infected people can go to work, take the subway, go to church or to the movies — unaware that they are emitting viruses that can infect others.

One of the luckiest breaks the world got with the SARS outbreak of 2002-2003 was that people weren’t contagious until they developed symptoms. The same is true of MERS. As a result, it became easier for health officials to try to limit spread once they identified a new case.

Containing new coronavirus may not be feasible, experts say, as they warn of possible sustained global spread

https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/26/containing-new-coronavirus-may-not-be-feasible-experts-say/

China’s health minister, Ma Xiaowei, warned Sunday that the virus seems to be becoming more transmissible and the country — which has taken unprecedentedly draconian steps to control the virus — was entering a “crucial stage.”

China’s actions — which include shutting off flights and trains from some affected cities and effectively putting tens of millions of people into quarantine — may not be enough to stop the virus, experts said.

“Despite the enormous and admirable efforts in China and around the world, we need to plan for the possibility containment of this epidemic isn’t possible,” said Neil Ferguson, an infectious diseases epidemiology at Imperial College London who has issued a series of modeling studies on the outbreak.

There may be as many as 100,000 cases already in China, Ferguson told The Guardian newspaper on Sunday, adding the model suggests the number could be between 30,000 and 200,000 cases. “Almost certainly many tens of thousands of people are infected,” he told the British newspaper.