The world is NOT defeating the Wuhan virus (and when I say ‘world,’ I mean China)

By Kent R. Kroeger (February 13, 2020)

Forecasts for the Wuhan virus (2019-nCoV) are only as reliable as the reported data underlying them.

The world got sucker punched by the Ministry of Health of the People’s Republic of China yesterday.

In reporting on the Wuhan virus, the Ministry threw a cruel curve ball into the standard contagion forecasting tools. After the Ministry’s reports on the spread of the virus had shown day-to-day drops in the daily number of new cases for almost a week, the Ministry reported over 15,000 new cases in a 24-hour-period, most of them occurring in Hubei Province where the city of Wuhan is located (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Daily Number of New 2019-nCoV cases (Worldwide)

This graphic includes conditional data reported by Johns Hopkins CSSE for February 13, 2020 (Day 24)

The Johns Hopkins CSSE tracking website for the virus is now reporting 60,349 confirmed cases (59,822 in China) and 1,370 deaths (1,310 in China).

Though the Ministry hasn’t fully elaborated on the nature of this abrupt increase in China, it appears a concentrated effort by the Chinese government to “round-up” citizens…