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[Trekkin]

I'm afraid I'm missing the point that you are making Trekkin   

All I'm saying is that if the virus can speard as easily and is as deadly as the rumors claim then we are going to witness an unexpectedly big increase in the reported numbers from all over the world. And since these reports will come from different countries with probably different interests/priorities then it will be a lot more difficult if not impossible to contain/obscure the new numbers.

Right, and I'm not saying that's not a sensible approach to take, only that it's more complicated to do so than it might first appear. RNA viruses mutate millions of times more rapidly than their hosts, and they tend to trend more pathogenic over time, selective pressure being what it is. This has two main implications for trying to detect falsified numbers in its spread:

1. The virus that shows up in other countries may well not be Wuhan's 2019-nCov, genetically speaking, by the time it does, and we'd expect a priori that the more virulent strains are more likely to spread. If other countries do show that "Wuhan coronavirus" is worse than China is reporting, that could easily really be the case.

2. We're all talking about this virus like it's one homogenous population. It probably isn't, even now, so it's reasonable to expect different outcomes to correlate to genetic variation -- which might also account for misdiagnoses that become obvious in hindsight. If later estimates are higher, it may well be because we found a more complete set of rtPCR primers with which to reduce the false negative rate.

All I'm saying is that we should wait on extrapolating out the odds that China is fudging its numbers before we have a sense of the underlying phylogenetics of the outbreak.

[Ulfarr]

Thanks for the clear up.

[Naturegirl1999]

This is an interesting discussion. I hope people with the virus recover

[coalboat]

Next Monday is when the new year holiday in China officially ends. People will travel to the several biggest cities to resume working, which indicates another wave of spreading. Quite a few inter-provincial public transportation has been halted by government though, companies will have to cope with "work from home" being more or less a norm.

[Lidku]

Well it seems like the virus is inheritable https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51395655

A 30 hour year old baby has already contracted it. This means that this virus IS like HIV, were the offspring of an infected can pass it on through Mother-to-Child transmission... Very strange..

[Il Palazzo]

Lidku, you are like those pottery vessels that are no longer whole but not yet broken.

[coalboat]

Compared to respiratory droplets, this transmission path is almost negligible... And it is unlikely transmitted via blood. More likely via feces or respiratory droplets due to physical contact.

[George_Chickens]

A 30 hour year old baby has already contracted it. This means that this virus IS like HIV, were the offspring of an infected can pass it on through Mother-to-Child transmission... Very strange..

Or the infected mother could have coughed on it, or it came in contact with infected fluids from someone else.

[JoshuaFH]

A 30 hour year old baby has already contracted it. This means that this virus IS like HIV, were the offspring of an infected can pass it on through Mother-to-Child transmission... Very strange..

Or the infected mother could have coughed on it, or it came in contact with infected fluids from someone else.

If the baby is only 30 hours old, I don't think the virus would have time to incubate even if it were infected the instant it was born. It could have been contracted prenatally, though that seems very odd for a respiratory virus.

@Zultan: Sorry I deleted and then rewrote the post, I felt like I was making assumptions and I didn't want to seem like I was talking out of my ass.

[King Zultan]

?

[ChairmanPoo]

Lidku, you are like those pottery vessels that are no longer whole but not yet broken.

Lidku has forgotten the face of his father

[TamerVirus]

Dr Li Wenliang, one of the 8 original whistleblowers arrested for 'spreading rumors' after sounding the alarm, contracted the virus and died today. In essence, he has become this outbreak's Carlo Urbani

Meanwhile, Wuhan is now rounding up people and putting them in mass quarantine camps in stadiums, convention centers and the like

[Il Palazzo]

Dr Li Wenliang, one of the 8 original whistleblowers arrested for 'spreading rumors' after sounding the alarm, contracted the virus and died today.

Or did he?

The fate of a whistleblowing Chinese doctor who tried to raise the alarm about the coronavirus outbreak is unclear after state media stepped back from earlier reports that he had died.

A report in the Communist party-controlled Global Times newspaper on Thursday claimed Li Wenliang, 34, had died earlier that day.

But the newspaper subsequently deleted the story from its official Twitter account, publishing another report that claimed the ophthalmologist was fighting for his life in intensive care.

[TamerVirus]

Schrödinger's Doctor

Edit: Now officially confirmed deceased by CCTV RIP

[Lidku]

So Li Wenliang died from the disease huh? I thought people were saying only the Elderly or relatively immune compromised was susceptible to the affliction... This middle-aged man died even though he was perfectly healthy, knew about the virus beforehand, and presumably took all procedures to stave it off. Yet he still acquired it and succumbed... I