Posted: Jan 26, 2020 9:19 pm
I am not sure I am that much more informed on this, I certainly am watching this situation closely and discussing with colleagues.
The media are covering this heavily and I see various claims about the outbreak such as it is adapting to the human host quickly, that the R0 is somewhere between 3 and 4, that it is transmissible prior to any symptoms. All this stuff may be correct but we have moved from little data to a flood of raw data. I suspect that we will get much better transmissiblity data from the cases outside of the outbreak area where there is much less chance of contamination of data by multiple possible sources of transmission. The two cases I have been reading about from Sydney were both symptomatic on day 9 but this a small sample. I had anticipated that there would be many low grade cases which seems to be correct, this will seriously alter both the presumed mortality rate and exaggerate the initial transmission speed due to what will appear to be cases coming out of nowhere if asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic cases can transmit.
The media are covering this heavily and I see various claims about the outbreak such as it is adapting to the human host quickly, that the R0 is somewhere between 3 and 4, that it is transmissible prior to any symptoms. All this stuff may be correct but we have moved from little data to a flood of raw data. I suspect that we will get much better transmissiblity data from the cases outside of the outbreak area where there is much less chance of contamination of data by multiple possible sources of transmission. The two cases I have been reading about from Sydney were both symptomatic on day 9 but this a small sample. I had anticipated that there would be many low grade cases which seems to be correct, this will seriously alter both the presumed mortality rate and exaggerate the initial transmission speed due to what will appear to be cases coming out of nowhere if asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic cases can transmit.