Christian AlthausKonto zweryfikowane

True. But what if the confirmed cases are only a fraction of the total number of infected people?

Isn’t that pretty much a given, at this stage?

Do you have data that shows this? I think the distribution of severity of infection is still largely undocumented. We don't know what fraction of infection are being missed.

The only indicator I know of is in comparing the number of reported cases to the back-calculated estimates from @MRC_Outbreak https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/2019-nCoV-outbreak-report-22-01-2020.pdf … Whilst this does imply under-reporting of infections, it doesn't indicate that cases are a 'tiny fraction' of number infected.

But that is only an indicator. I expect we will see more estimates based on follow up contact studies soon.

Their earlier estimates were based on a much smaller number of exported cases around mid January. There are now over 50 exported cases. So it’s quite likely that epidemic in China is much larger than confirmed cases suggest.

Yes OK: 50 now vs. 7 at the time of writing, so if the central estimate was 4000 then, it should be ~28,000 now, give or take. If the upper confidence interval was 9,700 then, it should be ~70,000 now. Which is the same order as magnitude as the quoted figure.