Originally Posted by
gengar
Hysteria is never smart.
It is not, but we cannot assume those buying up stuff are all hysterical. A very few might have insightful info from within the quarantine zone, like the group I'm with. Others may have decided to not rely on official predictions, which may prove to be the wiser path.
Only 1 in 19 people who might have the coronavirus are being diagnosed in Wuhan, new research suggests
New estimates of novel coronavirus diagnoses in the Chinese city of Wuhan place the number of infected people far higher than 19,558, the current case count from the Chinese government. -
- As foreign nationals in China have evacuated and returned to their home countries, many governments have imposed quarantines. The Imperial College researchers based their analysis on passengers who had left China and returned to Japan and Germany on four flights from January 29 to February 1. All were tested for the coronavirus, and 10 infections were found among the 750 passengers. According to the paper, that suggests a "detectable infection prevalence of 1.3%."
The researchers estimated that given the exponential rate of the coronavirus' spread, 220 out of every 100,000 Wuhan residents would get the virus on January 31 alone. Since Wuhan has 11 million residents, that means 24,000 new cases on that day. The researchers compared that number to the 1,242 reported and confirmed new cases in Wuhan on February 3 and found a 19-fold under-reporting rate.
That calculation assumes there is a 14-day window in which a patient's coronavirus infection will yield a positive test. The team also ran the numbers based on the assumption that a patient has only a seven-day period of detectable infection. In that scenario, Wuhan would have 300 new cases per every 100,000 residents on January 31. In total, that's 33,000 new cases in the city that day — 26 times the official number on February 3. -
The news was always going to worsen. Now, it seems that things may be far worse than the Chinese can yet determine and/or have let us on.
One problem is that the statistics can only account for the cohorts of subjects that have managed to get tested and were reported, so far. If case counts are bifurcating between care units and morgues/crematoriums, that complicates trend analyses.