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I want to know how they identified a new viral pneumonia back in late November with just a handful of cases. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but since

I want to know how they identified a new viral pneumonia back in late November with just a handful of cases. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but since the initial symptoms are flu like wouldn’t it require a statistically significant number of additional cases, deaths or symptoms in order to alert the health officials that something new was taking place, and an investigation was warranted? In late November they had less than 15 cases but they had already identified it as a new virus. How would they know to look for a new virus with so few cases? Unless they had prior knowledge about a new virus that was accidental released, which prompted them to start looking.

baybal2 6y ago
Taiwan is a good calibration point. There, they managed to trace all cases down to a single arrival from the mainland. From that, it looks quite believable that it would've taken 3-4 full generations of reinfections to take the count to 200 hospitalisations. I think, 200 hospitalisations should've been around the same number for the signal to attract attention by Chinese disease surveillance, if it wasn't picked up by the purpose made SARS screening network. If we believe the news that Hubei already saw hundred extra deaths in January, and that hospitals were already near full in mid January, then the number of infections should've been already above 1000 at Jan 1.
DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
They didn't identify the new case in November. There is a report of a case that was retrospectively dated to mid-November, by searching through patient records and probably by re-testing samples. But that retrospective analysis was done months later. The virus was not identified until the end of December, which is more than a month after the case in mid-November.