Healthy vigilance needed on virus

There have been reminders of what Time has called ‘China’s opaque way of doing things’.

There’s no particular need for community palpitations over the possibility of a new coronavirus arriving in our midst from overseas. It would be gormless for authorities, and communities, not to be vigilant. Pointless, however, to be fretful. As things stand we’re facing the need for alert monitoring of sickness arriving through our airports – but it’s a task, not a torment.

Granted, in some respects we are in a similar situation to 2002-3 when severe respiratory syndrome SARS afflicted nearly than 8100 people worldwide, 774 of whom died.

That was a seriously scary time, all the more so because the virus had jumped from the animal world to humanity and was capable of transmission from human to human.

The broad-brush scientific reaction to this might be summarised: hate it when that happens.

But serious enough though the outbreak was, the virus did prove to be highly controllable. People who contracted it were quite sharpishly detected and quarantined, and the result worldwide was much less than the rampant contagion feared.

Once again this new virus has also sprung from China, this time the large city of Wuhan, and the spread is expected to be fanned, if that’s the word, by the widespread travel, internally and internationally, of Chinese for the lunar new year. So it’s entirely possible the rotten stuff will get into our community, not necessarily by people who are already showing the high temperatures and pneumonia-type symptoms, but by those who are still incubating it.

As things stand, it still doesn’t seem

It’s entirely possible the rotten stuff will get into our community

that the 2019 coronavirus is as virulent as SARS. But things change, and not only because sick people travel.

Such viruses do have capacity to mutate in unhelpful ways.

It could evolve into something more problematic still.

The upshot is that the level of scrutiny at our airport level is rightly being tightened somewhat, albeit not to the level of some, seemingly few, international airports where travellers from problematic destinations are arriving to find their temperatures are being taken.

China itself can expect particular international scrutiny for its conduct.

It was notoriously clenched with information when SARS broke out and its international reputation suffered as a result.

This time there has been a measure of praise for how quickly the authorities have shared the genetic information about the character of the virus with the rest of the world, but also reminders of what Time has called ‘‘China’s opaque way of doing things’’ kicking in as well, with state-sanctioned news coverage so muted, and the scrubbing of social media so diligent, that there’s concern many don’t know of the problem, or the precautions they would be wise to take.

As for New Zealand, we need to be sufficiently aware of the new risk that we apply good monitoring standards at both an official and a social level.