Just about everyone who's been following China's official coronavirus numbers has been able to see that they have been incomplete. Government officials know this too. There's no way they've accounted for everybody infected. How could they?
But at least we had what appeared to be a trend. We could observe the pattern to try and estimate the trajectory of outbreak. Now that's gone too.
You can understand why it has been decided that people who have virus symptoms, plus a CT scan showing chest infection, are now being counted in the "definitely infected" column. However, this has thrown the trend mapping into chaos.
Over the past 24 hours in Hubei alone, nearly 15,000 people were moved into the infected column. This would have sent shockwaves around the world, but actually, if you consider Wednesday's cases by the old definition, the rate could well mean another day of decline: a completely different picture.
So now, we're scratching our heads: do we start looking at the pattern all over again from Thursday onwards? This has also left many wondering what the real death rate must have been over recent weeks and the extent to which we should be treating the overall figures seriously anyway...
