The sudden lack of new information coming out of China has Chris spooked.
He walks us through the math here, showing how if the coronavirus follows its current geometric growth, over 100 million people could be infected by the end of February:
Don't take today's lack of 'news' as meaning the threat from this virus is dying down.
This could very likely just be the calm before the storm.
Be sure to stay up-to-date on Peak Prosperity’s ongoing full coverage of the coronavirus outbreak by visiting here.
Anyone else find is strange that the US hasn’t reported any new cases in days? Got to 5 and stopped even though there are supposedly >100 under observation. Never mind the 200 who were just flown in. They have to wait for a 3 day screening (why just 3 days?).
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/coronavirus-u-s-map-where-virus-has-been-confirmed-across-n1124546
“This map will be updated as more cases in the U.S. are confirmed. As of Jan. 29 (today), there were five: one each in Illinois, Arizona and Washington state, and two in California.”
“Coronavirus cases in the U.S. are confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based in Atlanta. As of Jan. 29, 165 samples from 36 states were being tested; five have come back positive, and 68 have tested negative. The rest of the results are pending.”
We reportedly have 10 people under observation as of today. A press conference with the Mayor of NYC and the Governor was held last Friday for the first 4 suspected cases. One ruled out, the other 3…crickets…so yes I am certainly wondering what the heck is going on here. I predict another Friday afternoon press conference with an update or no update at all. The silence on the first suspected cases is anxiety provoking.
China’s National Health Commission confirmed an additional 38 deaths and 1,737 new cases. Officials said that brings their total to 170 deaths and 7,711 cases, as of the end of Wednesday. They also said 170 people had been cured and discharged. The NHC said the new cases announced Thursday include the first one confirmed in Tibet.
Three people who were among roughly 200 Japanese nationals evacuated from Wuhan have tested positive for the coronavirus, according to public broadcaster NHK citing Japan’s health ministry. The three Japanese, who had returned on a government-chartered flight on Wednesday, had not shown any symptoms, according to the report.
The boy’s case, published Jan. 24 in the Lancet medical journal, was the first to demonstrate person-to-person and health-care associated spread of the newly identified virus, dubbed 2019-nCoV. The asymptomatic infection has fueled concern the pathogen, which has already spread to 15 countries and infected close to 6,000 people, may turn out to be harder to detect and contain than SARS, the similar pneumonia-like illness that erupted into a global epidemic.
The 10-year-old boy’s lungs were also scanned “on the insistence by the nervous parents” and showed signs of infection, which was confirmed by swabs of the back of his nose and throat. That meant he was capable of transmitting the virus even though the kind of tests used in airport screening for the virus would not identify him as a carrier.
I agree that it is valuable to try to project the number of cases going forward, but I don’t think that we will have enough test kits, or appropriate reagents, in two weeks or three weeks to show millions of positives throughout the world.
Also, some people need to be tested more than once before they turn positive (that is, they turn positive later in the course of the illness), which means that you need more than one test kit for each positive case, making the task of finding all the positives even more daunting. It may be that by next week, unless we devote entire factories to manufacturing testing kits, reported deaths continue to climb, but the reported number of cases deviates from that exponential growth.
The one story I read about a woman who had to be tested three times before she turned positive also suggests further challenges in preventing transmission. False negative tests are a scourge in medicine at the best of times.
Chris,
I’m really glad you posted this update. Last night, i was mulling over the data I was looking at and I said “This thing is doubling nearly every day”. This morning, I created nearly the same progression spreadsheet as you did. I showed Cindy the hockey stick chart, and she brought up your “how long to fill the stadium” animation… we both said, yea… the last 3 minutes.
Then I found the included picture, and was thinking about things from where the R.O.W. (from the China Perspective) sits:
Source: https://www.cmegroup.com/education/featured-reports/coronavirus-market-concerns-mount.html . (NOTE: I added the text and 3 arrows)
Best of luck to all, hope you have your preparations in place.
-eric & cindy
I’ve spent a grand since Thursday
following the headlines closely
people watch nervously at the store as I openly speak of a the potential for a pandemic
There’s a possible case in Maryland according to its Health Department. I wrote to them asking why they are refusing to disclose if the individual is on travel or State resident, and if he/she’s a resident, what county. The response…
“… due to MDH policies surrounding patient confidentiality, additional patient information cannot be disclosed.”
What county he/she resides in seems vague enough to me.
Test results still pending from CDC.
Chris, your logarithmic chart in the video implies a doubling time of about two days. How could that possibly be right?
Considering the very few cases that are reported as either deaths or recovery, it seems that the disease must take at least 30 days to run its course. If during that time each case results in 3.5 new cases, that’s one new case every 8.5 days, which would be the basic doubling time. Or, about a multiple of 10 every month. Do you follow me here, or am I misunderstanding something?
That would lead to an estimate of a little less than 100,000 cases by the end of February. Which is bad, to be sure, but not nearly as bad as 100 million.
The huge exponential growth in reported cases at this time must be a result of an increasing rate of diagnosis and reporting, not actual growth of the disease. Either that, or the R0 is much higher than the worst reported estimates.
Or, new cases from each existing case are heavily front-loaded, occurring during the first few days of illness, and then settling down. That doesn’t make sense either: why would a person stop transmitting the disease to new victims during the later phases of progression?
Another important thing to consider, is that the rate of transmission in developed Europe, USA and Australia/NZ may be much lower than in China. The SARS epidemic and Ebola both exhibited this phenomenon. This could either be because of better sanitation and government responsiveness in the West, or (as Larry Romanoff writing at Global Research suggests) because SARS, Ebola and now 2019-nCoV were developed as racially targeted bioweapons. Regardless of the cause, we should wait and see how this develops in the West before jumping to conclusions about the extent of the danger.
The view expressed by Kit Knightly at OffGuardian, that the figures are being blown all out of proportion as an excuse for enforcing martial law and/or cracking down on social media, deserves some consideration here.
The odds of dying from this virus in US is very small. Very few people in America die from viruses that have no co- morbidities. If you have had a organ transplant, morbidly obese or are immune suppressed and have poor responses too flu infections in the past than you should be concerned and take appropriate measures. I work in a medical ICU and it is very rare that normal people ever end up there, let alone die. Dying from the flu is fear porn. I worked with this patient population for more than 15 years and could work in any medical ICU in the world. This virus so far is not gonna have an major effect on the general population.
