By Moon Of Alabama

February 03, 2020 "Information Clearing House" - There are first signs that the novel Cornoavirus  (nCorV19) epidemic will come to an end within a month or so. An analysis from the Chinese media house Caixin provides the newest numbers (machine translated):

[O]n January 31, 2020, 2102 new cases of new coronavirus were diagnosed nationwide, 46 deaths were added, and 5019 suspected cases were added which increased by 6.1%, 7.0%, and 4.3% respectively compared with the previous day, and increased by 21.8%, 29.0%, and 23.3% respectively compared with the average of the previous three days.

There are some 12.000 recognized infected persons in total. More than 99.9% of all nCorV19 cases are in China. The growth per day is still strong but not exponential. With people now traveling less from, to and within China the epidemic will likely stay contained.

We had documented in an earlier post that neither the infectiousness nor the mortality of the novel Cornoavirus are especially severe. This New York Times graphic also explains that.

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More from Caixin (machine translated):

As of January 31, the cumulative number of severe cases accounted for 15.8% of the confirmed cases, and the mortality rate (accumulated death cases accounted for the cumulative confirmed cases) has remained at the level of 2.2% for 3 consecutive days.

Both numbers are relatively low and here are the first signs that the epidemic is coming to a halt:

The current situation of the new coronavirus epidemic situation is still serious, the epidemic situation is still spreading and spreading throughout the country, and the number of newly diagnosed cases has increased. At the same time, the growth rate of confirmed cases nationwide has also shown signs of decline. The number of newly cured cases on the 30th and 31st days exceeded the number of new deaths.

The declining growth rate proves that the quite extreme quarantine measure China has taken are very effective.