Thread by @juliaoftoronto

There are major discrepancies between China's early reporting of the #2019nCoV outbreak and new findings in @TheLancet.

A few of the biggest:

1) More than a third of the earliest cases had no connection with the market...

vox.com/2020/1/27/2108…

2) That includes the first known case of novel #coronarvirus.

3) There was direct evidence of human-to-human spread as early as January 2 (China only confirmed Jan 20)...

4) More than half of the early cases were people under the age of 64 — and half of people in ICU were between 25 and 49. Not the picture authorities were painting.

I spoke to global health thinkers over the weekend about what this could mean...

vox.com/2020/1/27/2108…

They suggested a few potential explanations:

1) "Fog of war" early in an outbreak — info coming out is messy, inaccurate, not necessarily by intention, @LSHTM David Heymann and @DrTomFrieden said....

@LSHTM @DrTomFrieden 2) China’s rigid bureaucracy caused delays in getting out information about what was happening on the ground, said @alexandraphelan (@Max_Fisher also had a great story about this point nytimes.com/2020/01/25/wor…)

3) A 3rd explanation: China was purposefully playing down the health emergency.

“The fact that the Lancet report is different from the official early Chinese account does raise enormous concerns around the truthfulness of information coming out of China,” @shoffmania said.

@shoffmania “It’s crucial to understand the earliest days [of an outbreak],” said Georgetown’s Dan Lucey. Not only does it help us understand how deadly and transmissible a virus is...

“It gets at how there’s been such rapid spread of the virus — not just across Wuhan, but to every province in China except for Tibet."

Have views on these discrepancies? I'm at [e-mail]