Except then why haven’t we had an explosion of cases worldwide by now? People were flying in and out of Wuhan long before the area was cutoff. And five million people left Wuhan before they closed the borders of the city. Why isn’t there a world wide explosion already?
Exactly, Gitana. The cases outside Hubei were being tracked to people who'd traveled from Hubei. Then it started to spread to more cities/provinces in China and cases outside China started to be tracked to travelers who'd come from other parts of China. Then there started to be tracking back of confirmed cases to places like Singapore, or local transmission within the people to the confirmed case.
All of this seems to back up the shape of the 'official' confirmed cases, except that I believe there are far more infected in Hubei than official numbers show, due to people not realising that it's the coronavirus causing their cough or whatever slight symptoms they have, the way that it's affected hospitals in Wuhan, etc.
At the same time, I was wondering if there might not be some confirmation bias in the testing if they were only testing people with cold/flu symptoms who'd come from/through a particular area. The guy in Brighton, UK, who was infected in Singapore and then spread it in France and the UK, and apparently to another person who then flew to Majorca. At the time when the Brighton guy came back from Singapore there were no warnings to travelers from outside of China... If it hadn't been for the other cases from the Singapore conference being identified, and him being in the 'at risk' group from that conference, he'd have just thought he had a mild cold, the people he infected would have thought the same and wouldn't have been warned by health authorities to self-isolate just in case. What is the chance of another cluster like that around the Brighton guy that hasn't been caught?
I think we've got to get out of this "omg, the plague!" frame of mind, because there's so much chance this will go global just like the flu does every year. And that also means our governments considering if we have enough hospitals, isolation units, quarantine areas, etc if we do end up with the same kind of numbers (or even more) than we have flu cases every year?