Hidden data is revealing the true scale of the coronavirus outbreak

[Dennis Donovan]

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/coronavirus-spread-data

Satellite images, internet speed and traffic information tell a whole new story about Covid-19

By GIAN VOLPICELLI

Friday 20 March 2020

Something was wrong with Malaysia’s internet. It was March 13, and the more Simon Angus looked at the data, the more he suspected that the country might be in the midst of a coronavirus crisis.

Angus is an academic at Monash University and the cofounder of Kaspr Datahaus, a Melbourne-based company that analyses the quality of global internet connection to glean economic and social insights. The company monitors millions of internet-connected devices to gauge internet speed across the world. For them, a sudden deterioration in a country’s internet speed means that something is putting the network under strain. In recent weeks Kaspr’s theory is that the “something” is linked to the Covid-19 epidemics – as people who are working from home, or quarantining, or staying home as a precaution start using the internet more intensely than usual.

“For people who are in lockdown, or in panic mode, or in self-isolation, the internet has become a fundamentally important part of their information source, and of their consumption of entertainment,” Angus says.

To put it bluntly, when millions more turn on Netflix, scroll through TikTok, start a Zoom call, play Fortnite, or simply scroll idly through Twitter, that has repercussions on the quality of the country’s internet. (That is why EU commissioner Thierry Breton asked Netflix to restrict high-definition streaming until the emergency is over.)

Now, Angus’s scanning had detected that Malaysia’s internet had become over five per cent slower in the March 12 to 13 timespan – worse even than in locked-down Italy. Officially, though, Malaysia had only 129 confirmed coronavirus cases – a relatively low number, although it had been inching up for a week.

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[Igel]

1. The title is strange.

And some of the article.

I keep trying to get the take-away that there's a much higher incidence of COVID-19 than the Malaysian government's letting on, but the data are just letting me infer that the response from the populace to is largely to engage in more strict self-isolation than the government's demanding.

The response where I live is very similar to the response in New York City, but the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 (as evidenced by the death toll) is much lower.