Coronavirus: Wuhan cases may peak soon with over 5% infected

Bloomberg

The new coronavirus may have infected at least 1 in 20 people in Wuhan, the Chinese city at the epicenter of the global outbreak, by the time it peaks in coming weeks, according to scientists modeling its spread.
The typically bustling megacity, where the so-called 2010-nCoV virus emerged late last year, has been in lockdown since January 23, restricting the movement of 11 million people. Trends in reported cases in Wuhan so far broadly support the mathematical modeling the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine is using to predict the epidemic’s transmission dynamics.
“Assuming current trends continue, we’re still projecting a mid-to-late-February peak” in Wuhan, said Adam Kucharski, an associate professor of infectious disease epidemiology, in an email. “There’s a lot of uncertainty, so I’m cautious about picking out a single value for the peak, but it’s possible based on current data we might see a peak prevalence over 5%.”
Health authorities in China and around the world are anxiously waiting to know whether the world’s largest known quarantine has been effective in containing the pneumonia-causing virus in Wuhan and across other cities in Hubei province, the landlocked region of 60 million people.
Kucharski, whose research focusses on the dynamics of infectious diseases, and colleagues have based their modeling on a range of assumptions about the 2019-nCoV virus, including an incubation of 5.2 days and a delay from the onset of symptoms to confirmation of infection of 6.1 days.