[ej3]

I'm not sure I need a tinfoil hat at this point to imply that the people who are supposed to mitigate the effects of this pandemic have no objective quantification of how pervasive the spread of this disease is already.

I'd be willing to wager that if there was a good enough historic and near enough to realtime dataset of individuals entering the ER with pneumonia, and this disease is actually atypical for the season: that the ramp actually started more than a month ago in some regions.

Although I do wonder if the necessity of some pre-existing condition to perpetuate the development of the disease might present some type of choke in the significance of the anomalous nature of the thing..

Anyone know of any dataset like this? It would be really interesting to consider.

[Maxious]

The Seattle Flu Study collects sample from people in the community, even before they are sick. Those samples will now be retested to look for this new coronavirus https://seattleflu.org/updates

[ej3]

Yeah, I'm not entirely sure this is interesting. The media seems overly concerned with 'COVID-19' specifically and I'm sure the backers of this project like to see relevant keywords, but I think in terms of an outbreak it would be more useful to consider specifically how this has immediately contributed to deviance from normal.

"... we've found 19 cases of covid-19 in [insert place]", or "35 deaths from coronavirus" deprived of context has nearly no utility.