I was just watching Democracy Now! live on their website as of writing. It turns out there is massive undercounting of infections and deaths. Apparently, in Wuhan, there are a few dead people lying in the streets and in cars because the civilian medical examiner/coroners-equivalents are too scared and/or under curfew preventing them from handling bodies. On the upside, the Chinese government commissioned several thousand beds-worth of world-class, negative-air pressure quarantine hospitals in a little over a week. And sadly, the doctor, Dr. Li Wenliang, a 34-year-old ophthalmologist, who discovered coronavirus and warned the world has died at Wuhan Central Hospital from it on Friday after returning to Wuhan to treat patients and then contracted it himself. The more accurate infection and death numbers should be multiplied by viewers between 2x and 10x when it is reported by Western media because the information is both delayed and undercounted, and the few citizen journalists and expats foreign journalists with local knowledge believe this is the case. Not to freak out, because this isn't the Spanish Flu, SARS or the 1968 pandemic, but to more accurately account for the delay and underreporting.
I’m not an epidemiologist and don’t know much about past pandemics, but this seems a lot worse than SARS to me. I’m not sure it’s as bad as this article suggests it could be, and am inclined to agree with the caveat towards the end about it having infected far more people than are being identified due to many having only mild symptoms.
I’ve heard that SARS was underreported as well, and I know the SARS mortality rate was about 10%, but still, this seems to be much harder to contain and likely to infect many more people, despite the extreme quarantine efforts. It’s already surpassed SARS in terms of infections and is very close to beating SARS in terms of deaths, with the numbers we currently have, and in a far shorter time period.
I don’t think it’s going to spread as rapidly elsewhere as it has in China, as it seems there was kind of a perfect storm of dense crowds, meal sharing, incentive to cover things up, and lack of early quarantine measures due to the lunar new year. So while I think it’s unlikely to end up being as bad the Spanish flu because those ideal early conditions are no longer in effect, it doesn’t seem entirely crazy to think it could be comparably impactful eventually.
Obviously I hope I’m wrong. And again, I’m not an expert on any of this, so my opinion should be taken as rudimentarily informed speculation. I know very little about the Spanish Flu or the 1968 pandemic, so my ability to make well informed comparisons is limited. It just seems like this has the potential to get a significantly worse before it gets better.
Agreed that the naive method will lead to underestimation of the CFR. Though I'm not sure if it's really as high as estimated here. Looking at the numbers reported from provinces in China other than Hubei (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%932...), as of 5 Feb 2020 there have been 14 reported deaths but 520 reported recoveries. This puts the CFR at 14/534 = 2.6%.
I can only guess why the CFR in Hubei seems to be so much larger. My guess is that the medical system in Hubei is simply overwhelmed by the number of patients, and that only severe cases get treated in hospital and diagnosed. Patients with mild symptoms don't get diagnosed and the majority of them recover.
Still, caution is advised. Everybody take care and be safe!
