Originally Posted by
GBM.flights
1 day later and this dropped (From
FRance24):
This is exactly what drives me nuts on the current reporting on the coronavirus issue, everything has to be reported immediately and nobody even takes 5 min to give some context.
What I was able to understand after some googling: this "dramatic" spike (they could have used a different adjective, but well, whatever gets the clicks) is driven by a change in diagnostics measures. What seems to have happened is that they had capacity issues on the nucleic acid based virus detection scan, so they decided to also classify as infected anybody who showed a lung infection on a CT scan. So obviously this increases the numbers.
What we don't know if these "new" cases really all happened in the last 24 hours, or have only been just reported just now because of the new criteria and have accumulated over the last weeks.
If these really are all "new" cases we have a significant issue. Otherwise (and this seems the more likely scenario to me) we just had a underreporting (of about 40-50%) of cases over the past, but it doesn't mean that the trend of new infections going down we clearly observed over the last week is broken, and that the rather draconian measures taken in China are not working.
And let's not forget, a lung scan is a proxy, but cannot confirm that what you see on the CT is corona or just a regular pneumonia. So the new diagnosis method has its own flaws.