[contingencies]

Absolutely. It's marketing bullshit. Nobody has current figures.

In fact, multiple specialist academics said ~3 days ago that only 5% of cases are confirmed, now may be less due to reports of equipment shortages, the additional time the virus has had to disperse geographically, and Chinese New Year. Therefore, we can multiply any official figures by 20x. Official figures are nearing 5,000 cases, which extrapolating from those estimates means we're at around 100,000 infections as of today.

Source: I wrote and am maintaining an animated map of the domestic spread (the one on Wikipedia), over here: https://github.com/globalcitizen/2019-wuhan-coronavirus-data... .. powered by two scrapers, main one is from DXY, which is ahead of this 'real time' map by many hours, judging by total figures.

[unethical_ban]

Or another honest attempt that just isn't as up to date? Jeez.

[infinity0]

The exponential growth always slows at some point, so unconditionally multiplying by 20 is unrealistic.

[scottLobster]

If you're suggesting the virus is approaching population saturation levels in Wuhan, then 20 is far too low a number

[infinity0]

Why are you assuming that epidemics only stop growing exponentially when they reach population saturation? That is not the case for all the recent respiratory epidemics.

Even if they do, why is 20 a "low" number? They are talking about estimating the current real figure, from the current laboratory-confirmed figure. 20 seems pretty reasonable if a little high, assuming the epidemic is indeed still in the exponential phase.