Italy Reports Almost 2,000 New Cases In 24 Hours -- March 9, 2020

Wow. The Italy numbers have been posted.

In the daily note earlier this morning I posted:

Italy: pending; the country usually reports late in the day; I'm betting at least 1,500 new cases if they're honest.

So, quick! How many new cases did Italy report for today, March 9, 2020?

A whopping -- are you sitting down -- 1,797 new cases -- by the way, we now have the explanation for Italy's high number of cases. The answer was provided at 12:30 p.m. Central Time today.

Anyway, the Italian numbers today, March 9, 2020:

• new cases: a whopping 1,797
• new deaths: 97
• fatality rate: 463 / 9,172 = 5%; pretty much unchanged; 

Observations that should scare the heck out of Italy, the EU, Switzerland, and France:

• 1,797 new cases in Italy -- just the new cases in one day -- exceeds the total number of cases in every country of the world, except China
• 1,797 new cases in Italy is 40-fold greater than the number of new cases in China;
• China has this thing under control; whether it stays that way or not is another question;
• there were 199 new deaths total, around the world
• at 97 new deaths, Italy accounted for almost 50% of all new deaths

The overall data points are going to look really, really bad when those results are posted later tonight.

A Parthian shot: my hunch this morning that Italy would report at least 1,500 new cases today was right on target. Whoo-hoo!

By the way, we now have that case study. Re-posting:

Case study: some time ago I mentioned that the Diamond Princess cruise ship would be a great case study. We now have that case study, over at Ice Age Now. It's a must-read article:

• case fatality rate: 0.85 percent (of the 705 that tested positive, six died)
• but look at this: of the 3,711 confined to tight quarters, six died, which converts to 0.25
• transmission in that setting was incredibly low (or they stopped it pretty quickly through quarantines)
• the article does not say if all have been tested, or only those symptomatic; there is such a thing as asymptomatic carriers in all (?) infectious disease outbreaks;
• finally, not a single Diamond Princess patient under the age of 70 has died;