I don't think their China figures are accurate. The January 31st estimate was 11,000+ a bit. They seem to have gotten rid of their blog. They had a blog entry for January 31 that said that their estimate (not the reported # of 11,000+) for the actual infection total was 50,000 at that time. I suspect that by the time the new virus caught attention, the true number of infected people in Hubei must have been not 50,000, but 10 times as many, if not more. The number of very sick people - and the number of deaths in Hubei - were just the tip of the iceberg - the iceberg being a very large number of undiagnosed milder cases.
This would explain the discrepancy in fatality between Hubei and other locations, including in China - which showed up when the disease was already feared, and everyone with flu-like symptoms, even mild ones, got tested.
If the numbers posted on the Johns Hopkins site are fake, then we really have no idea what to expect. My overall sense is that they’re probably close to reality. They are, kind of, what one would expect in a situation like this. |
