Molson Hart

The 2nd issue is that the initial infection will grow faster in Italy than in China. Being at ground zero, Wuhan could only grow naturally. For Italy, patient zero could be augmented by patient 2 and 3 from China, patient 4 from Germany, patient 5 from Spain.

Like the New York outbreak which blew up, the seeding wasn't one asymptomatic farmer from but probably hundreds coming in from Europe that went untested which is why it went super exponential.

Your argument is circular. What you say about NYC or Italy, that patient 2 or 7 could create additional clusters which would accelerate the exponential growth there, also applies to 上海，北京，广州 etc. & it's reasonable to assume patient 2 & 7 went there before NYC or Italy.

It would... Had those cities not been locked down a day after Wuhan.

Your argument assumes that the country is totally water-tight in its control, not only domestically, but internationally (air, sea, and land). IMHO, that's mathematically impossible. Too many people, borders, interactions. Also, China didn't know what was happening in Italy.

It doesn't have to be water tight, it just needs to reduce spread from 3.8 to 1.3 which have exponential effects down the line in the total number of cases. Even America's half assed stay home order is going to reduce spread. Just look at Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore's

imported case numbers, the Lying Chinese exported an order of magnitude less cases to those heavy screeners than travelers arriving from the West.

March 31: 0 domestic cases. 48 imported. March 30: 1 domestic cases. 30 imported. March 29: 0. 45. March 28: 0. 54. This is not 1.3. This is .001. I may continue this later. I have to finish some work. Thanks for calling me innumerate, idiot.