No.

We know from genomic analysis [1] that "The common ancestor of circulating viruses appears to have emerged in Wuhan, China, in late Nov or early Dec 2019."

It's fun to speculate about other possibilities, but I personally like to stick to what the science tells us.

[1]: https://twitter.com/nextstrain/status/1248707010750640128

Very interesting, thanks for the link. In that case, how should that change our mental model? It seems like more people in Western countries are infected than visible, doesn't that mean the same would apply to China? How would it spread so fast in December?

US is generally not testing people with mild symptoms to significant symptoms. We are mostly telling people to stay home until you have difficulty breathing.

That’s why are deaths to cases ratio is so high before the new infection rate has dropped to near zero for weeks. Adjusting for infection vs death curve in China US deaths from people currently infected are likely to hit in the ballpark of 50k to 100k. Assuming we get new infections under control in the next few days and keep it low for the next month.

That report appears to based on genomic analysis, which obviously only includes cases that were tested, not undocumented transmissions before the discovery.

The article you cite says: "The common ancestor of circulating viruses appears to have emerged in Wuhan, China, in late Nov or early Dec 2019. Accordingly, the majority of sampled and inferred ancestral cases were located in Asia during this early period. "

It samples cases that are detected after the fact, from which they are able to reconstruct the phylogeny with impressive clarity. If you are not familiar with the work of nextstrain.org, I highly recommend it, they are brilliant.

well, google coronavirus searches in China, specifically Hubei province, spiked in September of 2019.

Science is a term being twisted out of its original context. if people keep doing that, its going to be a pejorative.

Even if I were inclined to believe such statements without a link, this doesn’t make any sense.

For Google searches to spike, information about the disease would need to be public knowledge. And at that point, you wouldn’t need Google search traffic to prove anything.

Also: Google is blocked in China, isn’t it?

How is Google searches relevant here? Was the news of possible coronovirus outbreak leaked to the public?

Also, do you have a source?

Do you have a link to that? I'd love to know more about why this would be the case.

Here's my attempt to validate the claim: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2019-01-01%202...

I'll leave it for readers to determine whether it holds up.

So there was 0 searches, then ~90 searches suddenly? Yeah no sounds like just noise. There will always be some people searching about corona viruses, they always existed and we always knew of them.

Source?

to respond to everyone at once: I didnt include the link because this is public knowledge anyone can access. It was provided below but the original search doesnt work anymore. it literally worked till today. I do have a picture of it I had taken, but HN doesnt provide the ability to share pictures.

It was a search for 'coronavirus' in china between 8/1/2019 and 01/01/2020. It showed a spike of 100 on September, 21, 2019 and another in December of 2019. However, this search no longer works. All of the traffic came from Hubei Province.

what gnulinux said about '90' searches is wrong. This is 'Google Trends is a search trends feature that shows how frequently a given search term is entered into Google's search engine relative to the site's total search volume over a given period of time.'

IAmEveryone comments are just all wrong. this doesnt mean 'it would have had to been public knowledge'. It means searches on google were performed on that term, specifically in Hubei Province. and yes, google is 'blocked' in china. That doesnt mean its not used there, just less often.

No for several reasons. The Dimond Princess had over 100 crew of young healthy adults test positive and only 25% where asymptotic long term. Additionally South Korea has a massive effort into contact traction which demonstrated just how rapidly the disease spread. Their mortality numbers looked to be about 0.6% early on, but eventually hit 2% a month after the peak with people spending weeks in critical condition.

On top of that it’s spread rapidly across every country outside of China and there uncontrolled growth rate showed a similar doubling every few days.

>> Their mortality numbers looked to be about 0.6% early on, but eventually hit 2% a month after the peak with people spending weeks in critical condition.

I see this repeated often but this is a misrepresentation of the statistics. Case fatality rate (CFR) is not the same as mortality rate. The CFR is the ratio between deaths and confirmed cases, mortality rate is the ratio between deaths and total number of people infected. The former number is 2% in South Korea now, the latter can not be measured directly without testing 100% of the population continually during the entire timespan of the outbreak, but it is (practically speaking) by definition significantly lower than 2%, unless there is a huge number of unaccounted Covid-19 deaths, which is very unlikely.

Agreed, although a nitpick: I think what you call "mortality rate" is called "infection mortality rate". (Totally agree with your important point that IFR < CFR.)

Mortality rate is population and cause specific. So CFR is a mortality rate, though different than the overall diseases mortality rate.

That said, your definition is also in common usage and less ambiguous.

I think it’s fair to assume most people are mostly interested in statistics that give an indication of the likelihood of dying from a Covid-19 infection, which means you would have to look at the infection mortality rate and not the CFR. So in that sense I think it actually would be somewhat comforting if if it turns out many more people have already been infected than previously assumed. But just to be clear, I don’t want to pretend anyone can reliably claim this considering we still don’t have enough data to create models that can be used to approximate infection rates.

When we say long term here, do we mean within the 14 day incubation period that's been going around? Or does this imply incubation period is likely a lot more than 14 days, maybe in the order of months?

Within 14 days, but most people where evacuated to different countries almost immediately after infection. So, it took longer to gather the data on that population.

> The Dimond Princess had over 100 crew of young healthy adults test positive and only 25% where asymptotic long term

Have you got a source for that?

what do you think about iceland?

Iceland’s peak was significantly more recent than China or South Korea which continued to have regular deaths over a month after their peak. So, my expectation is their deaths will likely double in the next three weeks. Which would be consist with ~1/2 their ICU cases dying. That said it’s a small sample size so significant variability is possible.

Just compare new cases vs new deaths here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_S... vs new cases here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_I...

On the positive side, they seem to have contained the virus extremely successfully which was likely aided by a low population density, early reaction, and good testing.

Just a point on the comment "~1/2 their ICU cases dying".

The University Hospital handles most of the cases (and all except two deaths). According to their statistics* a total of 25 have been in ICU ("Á gjörgæslu frá upphafi"), total of 13 on ventilators from the beginning ("Í öndunarvél frá upphafi"), with as-of yesterday 3 still on ventilators ("Í öndunarvél") and 6 deaths ("Andlát samtals vegna Covid-19"). So that's less than a quarter of ICU cases dying and half of those on vents.

* https://www.landspitali.is/default.aspx?pageid=b629a8e0-b262...

Interesting, putting that may people in ICU that don’t need vents likely relates to a less stressed medical system. But the numbers are low enough it could just be statistical noise.

I wish the media would focus more on the outliers of the doomsday narrative, as well as the long term consequences of the lockdown solutions being pushed.

covid-19 is bad, but seems nowhere near comparable to what much of the developing world faces on a daily basis (4000 kids die a day from malaria?!?)

I have almost exclusively used Wikipedia for keeping track of the outbreak. Media has become really bad at communicating complex issues that are rapidly changing over time especially as different groups are trying to shape messages to the public.

Face masks for the general public being the most obvious example.

Hospital Patient Zero has been traced back to Dec. 1.

Given that most ill people don't get lung complications, that likely means Nov. was the real patient zero. This is close to 100% certain. It should be verified by looking at Chinese sites.

No.