After two full months of unimpeded travel to the US from China, how is it we have only 12 confirmed cases. The weeks long transmission period of those thousands of potentially infected Chinese occurred while they were here. I’m not trying to downplay caronavirus but did anyone suspect only 12 cases to date 3 weeks ago? I don’t believe the US government is fudging the statistics.
One thing that should be tallied is "who" is getting infected. Is is primarily those of Chinese or Asian descent? Are they more likely to catch the illness than those who are from European descent? Is there a race factor?
Several possibilities:
No more cases in the US, unlikely.
Health departments are choosing or told not to publicize the numbers
Local health departments just got the kits to be able to test. CDC had a backlog of a week or more.
There could be some more positives among the suspected cases who have not tested positive yet, because the test has 30-50% positive rate (https://flutrackers.com/forum/forum/-2019-ncov-new-coronavirus/828326-how-is-the-false-negative-of-new-coronary-pneumonia-caused#post828326)
The govt is holding back numbers until they can get hospitals prepared. However, if I were in charge of planning at a hospital, I’d be already doing this.
And, the lag time. A person can be asymptomatic for 2-3 weeks. The first case in the US was not even identified until 1/31, 9 days ago.
If you look at the chart someone posted above, the US and west are about two inches to the left of the margin.
We are way behind on the timeline. Which good because we can try to stop it from breaking out.
“… we have only 12 confirmed cases. “
And IIRC most of those are evacuees in secure locations.
It is strange though.
Give it another week.
Look at #33