Industries affected by the outbreak should keep a watchful eye on epidemic curve of coronavirus in China over the coming weeks

The 2019 coronavirus outbreak continues to rage on in China despite community quarantine and severe travel restrictions. Case count in China has increased at an astonishing speed, from just 600 cases on January 23 to 37,251 total confirmed cases on February 9, 2020, a 6400% growth over the last 17 days, equivalent to average daily increase of nearly 400%.

Kasey Fu, Director of Epidemiology at GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company, describes her views on the situation:

“It is crucial to keep a watchful eye on how the epidemic curve progresses in China over the next few weeks. Case count in outbreaks typically follows a bell-shaped curve and an end to the outbreak will be likely if we start seeing the back end of the bell curve developing, when new case counts start to decrease.

“The temporal trend of confirmed 2019 coronavirus cases in China shows that while the total case count is rapidly climbing, the number of new cases from the last week signals a small decrease. However, only time will be able to confirm whether this is truly a downturn of new infections.

“Another aspect to pay attention to in terms of the increase in case count is that we have not seen an official report of case count among medical workers, especially death count among medical workers. By January 25, over 1,200 medical workers from all over China were sent to Hubei Province to relieve the overworked local medical teams. Knowing case count among medical works will both inform the disease’s virulence and will also be a measure of how well China is coping with the demand put on its healthcare system and how transparent their information sharing practices are.”

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