It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… and indeed, coronavirus continues to behave like two entirely different viruses.

On the level, I do not have a great explanation of -why- that is (I can take some guesses), but the data are what they are.  

In the “good” column this week, there is, at most, one additional death outside of China as an 80 year old woman was reported to have succumbed in Yokohama province Japan in US news reports this morning.  She did not make the WHO report that came out this afternoon though.  So, who knows?  Even if the Japan report is true, that keeps the “outside China” mortality much, much closer to the flu and likely to land somewhere in that zone.  I was sent an epidemiology estimate doing some mortality estimates that put the likelihood of the entire outbreak, and “true” coronavirus mortality somewhere around 1% with a 95% confidence interval of 0.5-4%.  If the “outside China” cases continue this mortality trend (and that seems HIGHLY probable at this point), I think you are much closer to 0.5% and a 95% confidence interval that drops lower than that. 

I still think that particular report is hampered by the overweight it -has- to provide by sheer weight of numbers to the “inside China” cases, which are utter fabrications as last night’s bump of 14,000 infections and several hundred deaths show.  China is just making stuff up right now, and there are some good sources out there (Ben Hunt’s latest at “Epsilon Theory” for instance) that showed just how easy it was to predict what China would announce for infections and deaths as they fit a quadratic model to try and control the narrative–as they do with everything else.  Regardless, there are a lot of cases, unclear how many, but a lot (easily over 100,000 and probably much higher as I stated nearly a week ago) in China.  Who knows what the death rate is.  But when the epdemiologists get a 95% confidence interval of 0.5-4%, the drive to that “4%” is coming from a range of 11-81% mortality on the inside China cases.  -That- wide a range, despite having -that many more- “official” cases just tells you how utterly unreliable those numbers are.

It really is like you are dealing with two entirely different diseases inside China vs. out. 

Take as another example–more and more cities in China go under full fledged quarantine.  Businesses are shutdown, now through the end of the month at least, and they are talking -April- before China is fully back in business, even ASSUMING all of this works (narrator:  There was not much evidence so far that what China was doing WAS working…).  They’re adding 14,000 new cases that they will now cop to overnight, conveniently after some WHO advisors land.

Meanwhile, outside of that cruise ship in Japan, the new cases in the rest of the world have dried up to a trickle.  Seriously.  You’re talking 10-15 cases per day over the last week, and like 5 per day that were not on a cruise ship over the last two days.  And that’s -with- 4 separate known sources of infection around the world from one conference in Singapore (that’s where the “superinfector” who got about 8-9 other people sick got it, then went to a ski vacation in France, and then back to the UK).  Outside of that conference and the cruise ship (the ship currently has 174 known infections), it’s a couple patients here or there.

<Paladin>