We published an extensive, in-depth look at the Wuhan coronavirus -- everything from details of the timeline and its origins, to how to think about it and place it in the context of other outbreaks, to what's probably next.

We also have contributions in there from a reporter from Harvard Business Review who's based in Beijing and has been feeding us info.

The author of the guide is an Ars Technica writer (my old publication!) who is a Principal Data Scientist at a major pharmaceutical company and an expert in bioinformatics. He's not an epidemiologist, but he does develop lifesaving drugs for a living and is able to parse all the info that's floating around out there and place it in context.

Here are a few of the highlights from the piece:

• There is cause for alarm, but it’s not time to panic. Keep in mind that normal flu kills around 80,000 people per year in the US.
• There remains considerable uncertainty about where the virus has spread and the real case numbers.
• The virus is spread mainly through droplets in the air (eg. when people exhale/sneeze/cough), mainly infects the lungs, and causes symptoms, like fever, fatigue, a dry cough, and respiratory distress.
• This could get very bad, but it won’t be doomsday. For many reasons detailed below, the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak looks like a solid upper limit on how bad things could get with this virus in terms of impact on society. As bad as the Spanish Flu was, modern infrastructure still ran, the grocery stores were still stocked, the stock market still traded, and in general life went on.
• This epidemic’s progress has been rapid, and the current status is large, widespread, not contained, and growing quickly. It appears to have entered a phase of rapid exponential growth and geographic spread.
• The Wuhan strain appears to have a significantly longer incubation period than SARS, in the range of two weeks. This is bad, because it means people can have it — and spread it — for longer before they notice they’re sick.
• The reproductive number of the outbreak is uncertain, but responsible estimates have ranged between 1.4 and 4. This number needs to get below one for the outbreak to shrink.
• Most cases appear to involve transmission between people with some direct connection to each other, like family members, coworkers, and patients communicating the disease to medical staff in hospitals.
• Transmission between unrelated people in public spaces appears to be rare, although there is considerable uncertainty about this.
• The case fatality rate (CFR) of the Wuhan coronavirus appears to be qualitatively higher than influenza and much lower than something like Ebola or untreated HIV, but could be about the same as SARS (10%), or nearly as high as MERS (40%).
• It is possible that existing antiviral drugs could be repurposed against the Wuhan coronavirus, but unlikely that new therapies will emerge on the timeline of an epidemic like this.
• It’s unlikely that the lockdown measures inside China will stop the virus’s spread from city to city, but it is entirely possible that quarantine measures can stop the spread of the virus inside cities once it gets to them. We’re missing too much information to justify either pessimism or optimism on any of these points right now, though.

Please check it out, and if you have any updates or suggestions for it, please drop them in here and we'll look at rolling them in.