Coronavirus data from outside the outbreak epicenter is just as valuable as from the inside

The active impact of the new coronavirus is very different in China, where tens of thousands of people are sick, than it is in the rest of the world, which only has a few dozen scattered cases. But data from both environments is helping scientists as they work to understand the virus and the illness it causes.

“With a large number of cases you get a better sense of how the virus behaves on average in a community,” says Caitlin Rivers, senior associate at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “In a place with fewer cases, you can spend more time investigating each case.”

In the past week, researchers have published reports on large groups of coronavirus patients in China. One described the way the illness affected 138 patients at...

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