For the first time since a novel coronavirus was noted as the source of new respiratory infections and fever back in December, the number of active cases of what is now called COVID-19 fell on Thursday. The source of that drop is the region that has dominated statistics about the epidemic: Hubei province in China. After a slow decline over a series of days, newly reported cases dropped dramatically in the latest report from the Hubei regional government, enough so that all of China notched just over 400 new cases while reporting over 2,000 new people as recovered.
That news is a little less sparkly than it might seem, as part of the reason for the low numbers in the latest report are some bookkeeping changes that removed a few hundred previously reported cases that had been double-counted. But if bookkeeping changes can generate a 14,000 surge in one day, it seems only fair that they should also result in a 300-case drop on another.
What’s more worrisome on Thursday is what’s happening outside China. That news is less good.
I’ve been promising for a while that I would show one of the regional reports that were being put out by each province in China to give a sense of the details involved in tallying daily reports. The image on the right is just the top of the first page of the report for Hubei province on Feb. 19. It goes on for several pages after this.
The reason that I’ve highlighted the first few lines of characters in the image is that that’s the same section that is translated below, courtesy of Google Translate and a little editing.
From 04:00 to 24:00 on February 19, 2020, 349 new cases of new crown pneumonia were confirmed in the province, including: 615 in Wuhan, 5 in Xiantao, 3 in Shiyan, 3 in Suizhou, 2 in Xiangyang, and Huanggang City reduction of 5 cases, Ezhou reduction of 5 cases, Enshi Prefecture reduction of 5 cases, Tianmen City reduction of 13 cases, Xiaogan City reduction of 15 cases, Huangshi City reduction of 16 cases, Yichang City reduction of 16 cases, Jingzhou City reduction of 31 cases, Xianning City reduction 66 cases, 107 cases of reduction in Jingmen City.
At the very beginning, you can see the total number for Hubei—349—which includes both lab-tested and clinically defined cases. But right after that comes the news that there were 615 cases in the city of Wuhan, which doesn’t seem to add up. Except that it does, because whenever the word “reduction” appears in the report, what it means is that they’re correcting a value from a previous report, so the report moves around the region, adding a few cases here and there, taking away as many as 107 in some cities. Later in the report come totals, explanations, and some breakdowns over lab testing vs. clinical. It’s quite detailed, and there is one for every province. Also, I’m always amused that the Google translation of the Chinese for “novel coronavirus” is “new crown pneumonia.”
See how the top of the orange line went slightly down in the latest graph? That’s a very good thing. Let that happen every day. That drop within Hubei looks genuinely significant, but we’ll have a much better idea after the numbers come out this evening.
Meanwhile, there’s a problem. It’s called the rest of the damned world.
While the Diamond Princess didn’t rack up as many cases as on previous days, that’s likely due to its diminishing population as much as anything else. And the genuinely ill-fated cruise liner racked up its first two deaths on Wednesday evening, as two guests in their 80s succumbed to the disease.
Meanwhile, for Japan it was another day, another 10 cases. These cases didn’t seem to show any particular nexus—though one man did attend a festival where someone now known to be infected was present. The sheer randomness of the cases popping up around Japan speaks to an infection that could be spreading widely with few symptoms. There are still fewer than 100 total cases, but there is not a single area to be contained or connection to be traced.
But if Japan had a bad day, things were worse in South Korea. For a second day, the total number of cases nearly doubled. With 104 confirmed cases, 87 of them still active, South Korea moved into the No. 3 slot, following only China and the temporary nation of Diamond Princess. Many of these cases came in or around the city of Daegu, and incredibly enough, they were all connected to one person who had been previously diagnosed. Citizens there have been asked to go into a voluntary self-quarantine, remaining in their homes. The government has even called on them to wear masks while at home … though I’m unclear how that is supposed to help. The South Korean government has issued an “orange alert.”
Finally, there’s Iran. Just minutes after I posted on Wednesday that two cases had popped up in Iran, the country moved those cases from “confirmed” to “dead.” Since then it’s reported three additional cases. Only one of the new patients is in the same city as the patients who died. None of this sounds good. It absolutely suggests the possibility of a pool of undiagnosed patients who have spread COVID-19 to at least two cities. Neither of the people who died had traveled outside Iran.
The latest WHO Situation Report includes a detailed look at Case Fatality Rate, for those interested in how the experts are modeling this critical value. The far less detailed analysis in my spreadsheet puts the current CFR at 2.81% (still going up) and the Outcome Mortality at 11.8% (moving sharply down thanks to increasing numbers of recoveries).
The overall number of cases stands at 75,781 (+471). Total deaths are at 2,130 (+118).
Resources
World Health Organization 2019 Coronavirus information site.
World Health Organization 2019 Coronavirus Dashboard.
2019-nCoV Global Cases from Johns Hopkins.
BNO News 2019 Novel Coronavirus tracking site.
Worldometer / Wuhan Coronavirus Outbreak.
ProMed Health Map.