Coronavirus (COVID-19) Discussion Thread

[SvennoJ]

Mnementh said:

Snoopy said:

Cool, so we can finally agree with Trump and stop doing deals with China and give them the middle finger. It seems every 10 years a virus comes about and it always feels like it is from China. It always hurted the world economy, but this time it will put the world in a great depression.

Ebola came from Africa, swine flu came from Mexico/US, MERS came from the middle east, SARS came from China. So of all the bigger epidemics of the last year this is just the second from China. So your hatred directed at China is misplaced.

The plot thickens.... This was just on the news:
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3076334/coronavirus-strange-pneumonia-seen-lombardy-november-leading

A “strange pneumonia” was circulating in northern Italy as long ago as November, weeks before doctors were made aware of the novel corona virus in China, one of the European country’s leading medical experts said this week.

It is possible and would explain why it's hitting Italy and Europe so hard. If you take the peak of 6557 new daily cases yesterday and calculate backwards with the expected growth rate of 1.16x, that's 106 days worth of steady growth from case 1. It would have had to have started on December 6th at the latest. Yet since the growth rate has been lower for a while November is very possible. The current 1.10x growth rate calculated backwards puts patient zero as far back as October 8th.

It could have fizzled out in Italy and imported back in, or perhaps it went under the radar, in the middle of flu season, until the right people got tested.