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.