BREAKING: New dramatic drop in China Coronavirus case counts today to only 2015 new confirmed (down from yesterday 2475, peak 3887) See blue dots on plots attached. One week of declining trend. 
Note 1: For those concerned about limited test kits: Untested symptomatic cases are included in the “suspected” category (see plots attached to first tweet).
Note 2: Today twitter traffic suggested that China changed case definitions to reduce case counts. We analyzed policies (attached). Changes can only increase confirmed cases not decrease them. They don't narrow conditions they expand them.
Note 3: Related concerns about news Heilongjiang province reduced confirmed count by 13 lab-positive cases (1 other transferred to Hainan province). However case definitions indicate guidelines were incorrectly applied and the change corrected this.
Note 4: While people may claim nonsymptomatic positive-test cases should be included in confirmed cases, there is no reason to claim that the recent decline in confirmed cases is due to case definition changes.
Note 5: Difficult note: There are now 174 confirmed cases on Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan. Ships are disease incubators. The only positive is they are largely isolated from people off of the ship apnews.com/9664873123f31b…
Note 6: With China outbreak likely under control (see above), the main challenges now are (1) Stopping contagion elsewhere in the world, (2) Safely restoring normal activities in China.
Note 7: UPDATE: Large drop in suspected untested count (see attached green triangles) indicating the backlog is being tested.
It's a difficult situation, but they should have immediately separated the ship's passengers into subgroups so that the contagion didn't spread across the population.
The sharp increase and decrease is to be expected for an exponential process that grows and you get ahead of it, so it declines.
