Not that crazy when you consider that every novel disease (or maybe even life itself) started with just one or a few individuals.

What's interesting is that it is containable: Taiwan and Singapore both have managed to avoid sustained community transmission, and they did this by rigorous contact tracing and travel regulation. And South Korea acted similarly! But one bad case got through (and the cult responsible is uniquely problematic), and that's costing South Korea many lives and billions of USD.

The learning here shouldn't be that mass coronavirus death is inevitable, but that good policy that takes it seriously can contain it and make it manageable.

Why call it a “dark case” ?

How about an asymptomatic case ?

Was thinking like dark matter, you can't measure it directly, but you can infer its size from other signals.

Also it's not just asymptomatic cases, it's also symptomatic but not tested. Some people ignore it since it can present as a minor cold. Some people want a test but can't get one.

Yeah idk, just sounds a bit dramatic / alarmist.

The media would love this term. Maybe you should try patent it.

Very likely true re dark cases. China had at least a million positive cases of the virus.

China has 23 times the population of Italy, but only saw eight times the cases (eventually that will narrow even further). It's obviously absurd, especially given China moved slow to stop the spread in the early going. Every day that goes by we're getting confirmation that China lied aggressively about how extremely infectious the virus is, how easily it is spread, how large of a population it could infect and how quickly. That information would have helped the world a lot.

Italy's mortality rate is extreme right now, at 6.6%. Most likely they have a lot more cases than have tested positive thus far, probably at least two to three times as many are infected vs the official tally. I expect this will be a common theme almost everywhere, including in the US.

Outside of Hubei, China's done extensive community testing of everyone who presents symptoms that would be associated with coronavirus. The vast majority are negative. This isn't consistent with the hypothesis that there are millions of undiagnosed cases.