Quote:
Originally Posted by valenzuela
Italy data is important. The South Koreans are doing a very rigorous job with aggressive testing. They a stand a much better chance than the Italians.
But on the other hand Italy isn’t Iran either so I think that is the country you want to pay attention to see how this thing will develop if **** hits the fan.
I think the situation is already several orders of magnitude worse than people think it is. If you think about from the perspective of who's being tested vs who's at risk, the cult church in South Korea and the Diamond Princess simply happened to be two situations where it was extremely easy to identify at-risk individuals and in both situations, the infection rate turned out to be extremely high. Given the extremely high infection rates in these clusters, it's quite likely that lots of small outbreaks all over the world are simply going on undetected, as it's substantially harder to trace and there simply isn't enough testing capacity even in the developed world. Last I checked, only about 400 people in the US had ever been tested. I know someone whose close one passed away from pneumonia recently without ever being tested. There could easily be thousands of cases in the US already, we just don't have the ability to know yet.
And this is just from the expected failures in reasonably well-functional systems with most people acting in good faith. It's hard to believe anything coming out of China given that at every level, from individuals to families to organizations to local governments, entities have extremely strong incentives to lie in order to avoid being cut off entirely.