“they had 5000 of those cases yesterday”
At that rate that would cover just 2-3 days in the past.
That is scary and worse than I would have expected.
On the optimistic side, some of the “clinical diagnosis” patients will end up testing positive via a test kit and won’t be counted twice in the numbers.
The R0 is very high.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.07.20021154v1
We collected extensive individual case reports and estimated key epidemiology parameters, including the incubation period. Integrating these estimates and high-resolution real-time human travel and infection data with mathematical models, we estimated that the number of infected individuals during early epidemic double every 2.4 days, and the R0 value is likely to be between 4.7 and 6.6. We further show that quarantine and contact tracing of symptomatic individuals alone may not be effective and early, strong control measures are needed to stop transmission of the virus