We seen the numbers of around 80000+ infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but how much can we trust on these numbers from PRC?
We should be quite skeptic about the numbers as it turn out that PRC covid-19 tests only have a precision of 30%, while you need at least 80% precision to have a result that is more than a false guesstimate.
It’s a bit difficult to estimate the number of infected in PRC, but we can estimate that there been made more than a half million tests which has only detected 30% of the infected. If we assume things like all the infected have been tested, then we would most likely have ~190000 more infected in PRC, so instead of ~81000 we would have 270000, this would more fit the way how the infection has spread in the rest of the world. The major difference with the rest of the world and China is that many infected died out on the streets in Wuhan, which would also indicate that the spread was maybe even worse, maybe we are talking about 500000 infected.
There been a case in Italy which could have been patient zero, Flavio Briatore claims he had covid-19 like symptoms in December 2019 with lung changes similar to those with covid-19, if he was the first one in Italy (or among the first ones), this would mean that SARS-CoV-2 spread in China long before December 2019 and those we would need to double the numbers again and guess on that at least a million Chinese got infected.
On top of all these, we know that PRC has under reported the number of infected to look like they had it in control, so maybe we should double the number once more and count on 2 million infected just in PRC (excluding the colonies of Macau and Hong Kong with somewhat more democratic rule). If we assume the 2 million infected number, then we can better understand the rapid spread in the rest of the world.
In the early January we had reports from PRC that there was people who had Covid-19 without any symptoms at all, this may come from false positives, so we may need to lower down that estimation back to 1 million. The faulty tests may also explain how people in PRC has been diagnosed with Covid-19 after they have been declared healthy from their first case of Covid-19. We should assume that you can get Covid-19 more than once, until we seen European data about this.
The world should think of claiming compensation for the pandemic from PRC, as they haven’t done everything they can to stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2, instead they have arrested doctors who warned about the virus in December when epidemic was already spreading fast in PRC.
Update: According to information from Republic of China, just in Wuhan over 40000 people died of Covid-19, this based on the number of urns that mortuaries had ordered during two days time. We assume that the death rate in PRC was as low as in Italy, then we have at least 500000 people infected with SARS-CoV-2 in just Wuhan, so we would be up in those 1 to 2 million cases as we already guessed at.
Source: Taiwan News