Originally Posted by
BuildingMyBento
China + illegal animal markets? You don't say?
I'm amazed the region (including ASEAN) doesn't have more coronaviruses, considering how valuable endangered species/tusks/ingredients for male "virility" can be.
Anyway, the bug has spread to Guangdong, too. HK border closure imminent? I know that mainland numbers to the HKSAR(S) has dropped, but there's still traffic.
That's unlikely to help, as the virus is already on both sides of the border. The only time we ever had a successful quarantine was when the Old World and New World were separated by the oceans and literally no one traveled across said oceans. But it only took a few Spanish conquistadors to introduce Old World diseases like measles and smallpox to the New World and once they did, there was no stopping the spread until they ravaged the whole population and the survivors had immunity. Today, the best way to stop viruses like this is through good sanitation habits, isolating people who are obviously sick, developing a quick test to detect people who are exposed but not yet symptomatic, and developing a vaccine. Sealing off borders has never really worked. Can you think of a case where it did?
https://www.vox.com/2020/1/23/210783...rus-travel-ban
Fortunately, this thing doesn't appear to have the contagiousness of the measles, but the things they're doing inside of Wuhan appear to be unhelpful. My wife reported that they apparently had a large public dinner with tens of thousands of people just 5 or so days ago. I wonder if this quarantine was a sort of knee jerk reaction to what they stupidly did less than a week before: at a time when researchers and medical workers are trying to isolate affected individuals and track down people they had contact with, they created a potential pool of tens of thousands of carriers in a matter of a few hours.