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I have not looked at Wuham-specific numbers for some time. I will have a look at some point to see if that data is available on an ongoing basis.

This is in Chinese but has the official numbers by location

 
Its not flu, and every time I see one of the shit tabloids call it flu I get annoyed.

I dont think there is anything comfortable about viral pneumonia.

Compare to the first global outbreak of the H1N1 virus this is not looking biblical
but fair point it viral pneumonia
 
Rather what normally happens under such conditions is that later on, serological testing of samples of the population at large is used to give an indication of actual infection rates. This is where they figure out what antibodies are left in peoples systems for a good while ater the actual infection has passed, and look for those.

I should also mention that unless serological testing has been done, its hard to come up with reasonable figures for things like mortality rate. Because the mild and asymptomatic cases mostly get missed, skewing the picture, and making the mortality rate look worse than it actually is.
 
It’s probably also worth noting that that has full recoveries at 42. I suppose death rate isn’t really complete until you’re sure someone has recovered. Or died.
 
E.g the confirmed death rate in Wuhan (45/618) would be 7.18%. Though I’m sure the various epidemiologists involved have their reasons for sticking to lower figures.
 
It’s probably also worth noting that that has full recoveries at 42. I suppose death rate isn’t really complete until you’re sure someone has recovered. Or died.

Yes thats one of a bunch of reasons why even the best possible data will lag behind.
 
E.g the confirmed death rate in Wuhan (45/618) would be 7.18%. Though I’m sure the various epidemiologists involved have their reasons for sticking to lower figures.

The number is all over the place and probably most of the experts involved dont think those numbers mean much at this stage anyway. Or at the very least they pay attention to the numbers but expect them to evolve, possibly to a significant extent.

And sometimes there is detail in the language used that makes a difference. For example a few days ago I think I saw some Hong Kong scientists giving a 14% case-fatality rate, but the crucial detail on that one was that it applied only to those who were hospitalised by the coronavirus. As such its a number that can actually be fully based on the data we actually have, rather than all the unknown, mild, non-hospitalised cases. But even in that more limited domain, its still a little early for such estimates, and the raw numbers are changing so frequently at the moment that I assume most stuff I am reading is out of date by the time they've published.
 
Wuhan residents say they've been turned away from hospitals despite having symptoms so whatever figures they're giving for the number of cases are probably off by thousands. I'm not sure why they even bothered sealing the city off after 5 million people had already left.

 
Well, the problem is the official sources are not reliable sources of information and information is being repressed. For Chinese news, unverified reports coming out on social media have more value than they do in jurisdictions where the media is generally reliable, biases notwithstanding. We certainly should treat them with skepticism, but piecing them together can give us some idea of what is going on.

The difficulty in judging rumour and fact is likely contributing to the sense of panic, and I have a feeling that panic and over-reaction may turn out to be more of a problem than the disease itself, although time will tell.

Yeah. I don't need you to explain China to me, thanks.
 
Wuhan residents say they've been turned away from hospitals despite having symptoms so whatever figures they're giving for the number of cases are probably off by thousands. I'm not sure why they even bothered sealing the city off after 5 million people had already left.


Thanks for the article, which includes updates from the last figures we talked about (now 2047 China cases and 56 deaths).

As for the 'why they even bothered sealing off the city' thing, even without the revelation that 5 million people had left, we were talking about the horse already having bolted, and the picture now points even further in that direction.

The article has slightly more words on the stuff that I said might confuse experts. I've not found expert commentary on this stuff yet so I'll have my own stab at it.

“Some patients have normal temperatures and there are many milder cases. There are hidden carriers,” he said.

Ma said also that the virus had adapted to humans and appeared to have become more transmissible.
“There are signs showing the virus is becoming more transmissible. These walking ‘contagious agents’ [hidden carriers] make controlling the outbreak a lot more difficult.”

Yeah, this is linked to why optimism about containment has probably plummeted in recent days. I wont be surprised if the framing of what we are dealing with changes this week as a result.

My suggestions of confusion in regards 'virus is becoming more transmissible' is probably a language thing. In part its a tense thing, eg I would be more likely to say that if there was a change it already happened a while ago, or that it is our understanding and evidence of how transmissible it is that has changed, not the actual reality of the virus.

I'd put it like that for a few reasons, one of which relates to my next point.

The authorities had also not ruled out the possibility of the virus mutating in the future, he said, which meant it could spread to different age groups.

To date, most of the people infected are in the 40-60 age range, health officials said earlier.

I'm pretty sure that bit will make some experts groan. Because years ago some very real concerns about how things can mutate over time were explained to the media, in connection with H5N1 bird flu, and despite a kernel of truth to this stuff, its sort of taken on an oversimplified media myth life of its own in the years since. I cannot do the subject proper justice now, and there are a bunch of mutation-related things that particular branches of science need to take an interest in. But the main mutations they worry about tend to be the ones that make a virus good at spreading between people in the first place. ie something that clearly already happened with this coronavirus, otherwise we'd only be seeing cases with more direct links to the wild animal market.

Plus in this particular example there is a glaring contradiction. The idea that at the moment the virus is not spreading to certain age groups. That idea is unsafe, because so many of the known cases so far are the serious ones that required hospitalisation, and because they've just been acknowledging the 'hidden carriers', who could be in any age group. They are mostly hidden so the data just isnt there much yet, including their ages. But at least one of the discovered asymptomatic cases reported on so far was in a young child, for example.

Anyway, experts groan because they get bored of answering slightly misconcieved questions from journalists about the mutation threat. Largely because the threat most of the experts are focussed on is the one that already exists, the virus as it is now. Broadly speaking, the mutation stuff is more the sort of thing that is focussed on when trying to get people to take funding seriously, or trying to ensure that vigilance and surveillance levels remain high in situations where people are dealing with a small animal->human outbreaks where human->human spread seems rather limited, and they must guard against people not realising that the picture could evolve into something with wider spread potential. This latter thing might have been a feature at some early stage in Wuhan, or it might just be that by the time any alarming signs were seen at all, the reality had already gone beyond that, and not much could have been done to reduce the lag between the true picture and our understanding of it.
 
The caveat I should add to my thoughts is that it is always possible that statements made by officials are in part based on information we havent seen yet.

As this applies to transmission worsening, or mutations, I suppose there are a few possibilities. For example an impressive set of genetic info from a whole bunch of early cases has been shared online, and analysis of these has suggeted very little variation between them. If later samples turn out to show more variety, then talk of mutations has some legitimate point. Especially if any of them are in areas where we actually know something about the function or implication of the mutation, eg increased affinity to infect humans.

By the way it. was really interesting what they were able to deduce from the lack of variation in the initial sample set.


By comparing the two dozen genomes, scientists can address the “when did this start” question. The 24 available samples, including from Thailand and Shenzhen as well as Wuhan, show “very limited genetic variation,” Rambaut concluded on an online discussion forum where virologists have been sharing data and analyses. “This is indicative of a relatively recent common ancestor for all these viruses.”

Given what’s known about the pace at which viral genomes mutate, if nCoV had been circulating in humans since significantly before the first case was reported on Dec. 8, the 24 genomes would differ more. Applying ballpark rates of viral evolution, Rambaut estimates that the Adam (or Eve) virus from which all others are descended first appeared no earlier than Oct. 30, 2019, and no later than Nov. 29.
 
Sounds like the national holiday is being extended to Feb 2nd to try to help reduce the spread.

And the Director-General of the WHO is travelling to Beijing.
 
And the Director-General of the WHO is travelling to Beijing.

Not sure that'll help, the World Health Organization has so far refused to declare the outbreak "a public health emergency of international concern", which is hardly surprising, because it took them 8 months to declare the Ebola outbreak as such, they are not fit for purpose.

Ebola exposed WHO as unable to meet its responsibility for responding to such situations and alerting the global community," said an independent panel of experts in 2015 that included members from the Harvard Global Health Institute and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
The panel went further, suggesting the establishment of a new global health committee within the UN Security Council to declare outbreaks and international emergencies for more timely responses.

 
There are presumably big implications to labelling it ‘of international concern’. If the cases reported outside China start turning into localised and hard to contain outbreaks I imagine they would escalate their assessment as required. So far I haven’t seen any reports of this multiplying outside of China. Hopefully it won’t.
 
It seems the authorities in Wuhan are going to permit foreign nationals to leave, there seem to be some delegations organising flights for their people.
 
Some WHO failures are down to the political context. Global health is not a realm free from such concerns, and at the very least the WHO have been naive with the current PHEIC system. Its sensible to have a committee to make the decision, and its completely normal that not everyone on the committee will agree. But because the current system is just binary, the political (including economic) pressures that lurk behind such decisions are magnified. A more nuanced systems would allow for more wiggle room, and we'd have seen the level of alert/emergency raised already, instead of this wait to see when some arbitrary threshold is reached and the binary PHEIC switch is flicked.

If I had my way then the entire world and humanity would be ordered differently, so the political considerations would not be the same at all. But since we have the current shitty order it is no surprise that the WHO inherits various terrible flaws as a result.

I do tend to temper my frustration with entities such as the WHO a bit at times like this though, for several reasons. Firstly some of the criticism is from idiots who expect impossible feats of containment. Or conspiracy idiots. Secondly, in outbreaks such as SARS, health workers are on the front lines of risk, and many victims end up coming from their ranks. Including WHO staff. One of the victims of SARS was Carlo Urbani in 2003, a WHO infectious disease specialist who was in Vietnam. He died, and was one of at least 38 staff who were infected by an early SARS patient who had travelled after been infected in a Hong Kong hotel outbreak that was itself caused by another doctor.
 
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A bit more on Dr Urbani since I had mentioned him without the full context.


Dr Urbani, an expert in parasitic infections, was working in the WHO Country office in Hanoi at the time that SARS, a highly infectious and lethal disease, started to spread. In early 2003, while serving as an infectious disease specialist, he responded to a request from the French Hospital in Hanoi to assist in investigating a “severe case of flu”.

After examining the patient, his diagnosis was clear: this was an unusual case of an “unknown contagious disease”. Responding to the gravity of the situation, Dr Urbani alerted WHO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. His prompt action helped to contain the epidemic by triggering a global public health response that eventually saved the lives of countless people.

For the sake of public health and safety, Dr Urbani spent several days at the hospital coordinating infection control, quarantine interventions and maintaining the morale of hospital staff. He lived up to his conviction that it is a doctor’s duty to “stay close to the victims”.

On 11 March 2003 during a flight to Bangkok to attend a conference, Dr Urbani developed symptoms of SARS. He died of complication related to SARS on 29 March 2003 – a public health hero.
 
Why do you think its an unlikely claim?

Its true that I hadnt seen much in the way of explanation in the media for what details in particular lead to the claim, a claim which has been widely reported today. But there are a bunch of famous diseases that can spread at that stage so its not unthinkable, its just something people were hoping wasnt going to be true of this outbreak because it wasnt really seen with SARS.

Anyway I probably found the detail I was seeking, via someone on twitter linking to an article from the official state news agency. I had to use machine translation but it seemd to do a pretty good job. I'm not quoting the complete story, just the key bit:

"We encountered a patient who came to Hangzhou from Wuhan to attend a conference. When he arrived in Hangzhou, he did not have any symptoms. He did not have the typical symptoms of cough and fever. But it didn't take long for a few colleagues he had contacted to be infected. Symptoms appeared one after another. But at this time, he still did not have the disease himself. After returning to Wuhan at the end of the meeting, he did not get the disease after another two days. "Sheng Jifang introduced.

Sheng Jifang said that after different people are infected with the new coronavirus, the course of disease development and clinical symptoms may be very different. It is possible that this person developed symptoms immediately after infection, while another person had no obvious symptoms during the incubation period after infection. Therefore, it is difficult for ordinary citizens to identify.

Google translated from 专家:新型冠状病毒潜伏期没有任何典型症状的时候或已具备传染性-新华网

Main bit I would think should be changed to make more sense is that 'he did not get the disease after another two days' is most likely to really mean 'he did not show symptoms of the disease for another two days'.
 
That’s interesting case but there’s a posdibility that person was the vector.

The reason for the doubt is that a lot of symptoms of flu type viral infections are the direct results of the replication of viruses e.g. coughing up gunk made up partly from dead cells used for the growth of infection. Of course this coughing helps spread the microbes.

Other vectors need considering. Sharing resources at conference could be one. We cannot know from that for certain. The next couple of weeks may answer this question. Grim stuff.
 
With some illnesses it seems that the asymptomatic cases, of which will there will be many, are still able to shed the virus, so they can still transmit it to others. Its just that the rate of shedding may be substantially lower than symptomatic cases, for reasons including some of the symptoms helping to spread the disease like you mentioned.

Anyway yes I am expecting our sense of the picture to evolve quite a bit in the next week. And I dont want to get too hung up on the 'how much are asymptomatic cases spreading it' question without remembering that this is part of a larger overarching question about transmissibility in general. Whatever the details of the vectors that are responsible for the spread seen so far actually turn out to be, and however long it takes us to understand them correctly, the magnitude of confirmed cases in different places will tell its own story in the days ahead. One that will invite some assumptions that are probably quite reasonable.
 
If it's the case that people can be infectious without showing signs of the virus, then how can it be contained?

Well thats one of the reasons the mood has sort of changed a bit in recent days. Not the only one though, the evolution of the number of cases and their locations needs to be sufficiently worrying in order for these other alarming possibilities to resonate.

From what I can tell via things like twitter, some people who work in relevant disciples are at a slightly awkward moment where they are now feeling the need to ready themselves for the grim, 'containment isnt going to be possible' scenario, without yet considering it appropriate to completely ditch the previous containment possible scenario.

For example:

 
If it's the case that people can be infectious without showing signs of the virus, then how can it be contained?

Well, if the incubation period was very short and human to human transmission remained rare, then it could be theoretically possible to track down and quarrantine all the people who had contact with the original source. Some people would slip the net but most of those would not infect others. If all those infected developed recongisable symptoms, that would also help in their identification and containment.

What we seem to have here is a long incubation period, many asymptomatic or mild cases, and relatively easy transmission. That's a triple whammy of bad news for any containment efforts.
 
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Due to the passage of time since we last spoke about modelled estimates for total cases, numbers from such models will be considerably higher by now. To the extent that one of the people involved with the report we talked about the other day, was on Sunday giving a figure of 100,000 as his best guess at the present reality.


(the original model I mentioned assumed 4000 as the total number of cases by 18/1/2020, with uncertainty range bounds of 1000-9700, and obviously we are quite a way past the 18th now, plus certain assumptions may have changed).
 
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Latest official numbers:

New cases:
At 04:00 on January 26, 30 provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities) reported 769 new confirmed cases and 137 new severe cases There were 24 new deaths (24 in Hubei Province), 2 new cured cases and 3806 new suspected cases.

Totals so far:
As of 24:00 on January 26, the National Health and Health Commission had received a total of 2,744 confirmed cases in 30 provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities), 461 cases of severe cases, 80 cases of deaths, and 51 cases of hospitalized cures. There are 5794 suspected cases.
At present, 32,799 close contacts have been traced, 583 people were released from medical observation on the same day, and 30,453 people are currently receiving medical observation.
 
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