Earlier we had made a estimation of 1-2 million Chinese was infected with Covid-19 in Wuhan with 40000 dead, but this seems to just be far from the real numbers according to CNN.
It seams the Covid-19 epidemic already started in the early December, but cases was reported as flu even if the patients didn’t have any trace of normal flu virus. Also it took around 3 weeks to confirm if someone had covid-19 or not, which delayed the actions.
The first big epicentre was the city of Yichang from where it spread to Xianning and Wuhan. Numbers show that the situation was 3 times worse in Yichang then in Xianning and Whuhan. The epidemic had 2 weeks head start compared to Wuhan, which means both Yichang and Xianning managed to export many cases before any lock down.
As we know from samples in Europe, cases had been already exported from China in September to Italy, but from this years trend we see that the effect tend to be somewhat milder during summer and don’ spread as badly, which made the cases in Europe go undetected. We have to assume that first case would have happen sometime in June/July and spread quietly in Hubei province during the autumn and exported with Chinese tourists in small numbers to Europe.
Early December Covid-19 started to hit in large scale as the weather condition made more people to be indoors and humidity was right to prolong the virus life outside a human host. We can assume that a large number of the people in Hubei province got infected and a large number of them started to flee when the lock downs came in force, some to Australia/Europe/USA and others to other pars of China which in the end caused the world wide pandemic.
Based on how it looked in Hubei in early 2020, we can now push up the Chinese numbers to 6 million infected and 100.000 dead just during the first quarter for 2020. PRC keeps still hiding the numbers and blaming frozen food for the source as it’s a ugly thorn in the communists parties side.