Current reporting progress in China
Since the outbreak, reporting to the public has been developing from exploration all the time. From one side, governments of all levels announce new updates each day and reflect all indicators information via the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) [3]; on the other side, many domestic search engines, portal websites, etc. have developed their own surveillance systems respectively and update information each day based on the newest data officially from governments of all levels, which include case number indicators, trend monitoring, news from various sources (such as webpages, TV, newspapers, blogs, broadcasts, ect.) [6, 7]. Each of them have their own features and have attracted huge number of visits each day for concerns. Moreover, the reporting not only include information updates about China, but also the world.
Further analysis of the government reports indicate that indicators such as confirmed cases, suspected cases, recovered cases, and total number of deaths are all reported in total numbers along with their daily updates respectively based on provincial and city levels. These data together with the updates from the WHO have provided good basis for visual reporting at city, provincial, national, and international levels. Ratio analyses such as case fatality rate, recovery rate, etc. are applied to reflect the whole progress of various effort and interventions. These rates are further classified as Hubei, outside Hubei, whole China, etc. for comparison in curves. It should be noted that there are lots of influential factors affecting the fatality and recovery rates [8], for example, the fatility rate in Hubei is much higher than other provinces (4.03% vs 0.80%, by Feburuary 27, 2020), which can be partly explained that, even though Hubei is abundant of health resources, but still lacks enough medical resources to provide timely and effective treatments to the hug number of patients compared with much less patients in other Chinese provinces.
Incidence and case mortality rate can both be meaningful to be reported. Incidence indicates the infectivity of the virus over a time period, and case mortality rate can reflect the virulence of the new coronavirus. Both are yet to be reflected in reporting. It will be much helpful to report up to date incidence and case mortality rate for daily surveillance, and a trend curve can be depicted, which can indicate the cumulative risks and remind people to end the outbreak as soon as possible.