(Minghui.org) Radio Free Asia (RFA) released on February 13 an audio recording of an internal conference by Wuhan’s epidemic prevention department. Some officials who had access to confidential documents at the National Health Commission were heard saying that one reason this coronavirus epidemic is difficult to control is that some patients never exhibited typical symptoms such as fever before they died. Without a fever, such patients could not be identified and isolated, which made it easier for the disease to spread.
Three Characteristics
The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal, published an article titled “Protecting health-care workers from subclinical coronavirus infection” on February 13, 2020 and described three characteristics of the coronavirus.
The article wrote, “Even someone who is non-symptomatic can spread COVID-19 with high efficiency,” “conventional measures of protection, such as face masks, provide insufficient protection,” and, “...patients can also shed high amounts of the virus and infect others even after recovery from the acute illness.”
Hard to Control
Kwok-Yung Yuen from the University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen Hospital considered the coronavirus more dangerous than severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003. One of his scientific papers published in The Lancet on February 15, 2020 highlighted transmission of the virus within families.
Titled “A familial cluster of pneumonia associated with the 2019 novel coronavirus indicating person-to-person transmission,” the Yuen paper studied a family of six in Shenzhen who traveled to Wuhan and found that five of them (about 83%) were infected with the coronavirus and that one other family member who did not travel to Wuhan caught the virus after having contact with the infected family members.
Public Health Ontario said on February 14 that, although the first two coronavirus patients in the province had been discharged from hospital after recovery, they remained isolated since the COVID-19 virus was still detectable in their bodies.
After a man who disembarked in Hong Kong from the Diamond Princess cruise ship was diagnosed with the coronavirus two weeks ago, the ship went into quarantine on February 3 in the Japanese port of Yokohama near Tokyo. So far, 454 out of the 3,700 passengers and crew members have tested positive for the virus.
Katsunobu Kato, Japan’s health minister, explained, “Japan seems to have entered a new phase where the infection route of several new cases is unclear.”
Unreliable Data from China
Barron’s, an American magazine on finance and statistics, recently published an article titled “China’s Coronavirus Figures Don’t Add Up.” “The number of cumulative deaths reported is described by a simple mathematical formula to a very high accuracy,” wrote Lisa Beilfuss, “A near-perfect 99.99% of variance is explained by the equation.” Data analysts say such a near-perfect prediction model isn’t likely to occur naturally, and this casts doubt over the reliability of the numbers being reported by China to the World Health Organization.
The Barron's article quoted Melody Goodman, associate professor of biostatistics at New York University’s School of Global Public Health, as saying, “I have never in my years seen an r-squared of 0.99. As a statistician, it makes me question the data.” She said real human data are never perfectly predictive when it comes to something like an epidemic, since there are countless ways that a person could come into contact with the virus. For example, a “really good” r-squared, in terms of public health data, would be 0.7. “Anything like 0.99 would make me think that someone is simulating data. It would mean you already know what is going to happen,” she added.
The Chinese Embassy in the United States didn't respond to Barron’s request for comments. After the article was published on February 13, however, China reported on the same day that health officials in the epicenter of the outbreak found a surge in new infections after changing how they diagnosed the illness.
