USA TODAY International Edition
Other views: nCoV- 2019 isn't novel, and we know what to do
Laurie Garrett, CNN:
“Seventeen years ago, I was covering the severe acute respiratory syndrome virus for several months as it spread across Asia, eventually reaching 37 countries, sickening 8,098 people and killing 774 of them. ... By far, the most important measures to stop the Wuhan coronavirus will be those related to hospitals and how well medical teams can contain the virus. ... Most of the SARS cases in Hong Kong went to two hospitals: One had just a single health care worker infected, while the other suffered terrible losses in both health workers and patients who were being treated for other medical ailments. The key difference? The teams in the better hospital had years of infection control training.”
David Quammen, The New York Times:
“‘ Novel coronavirus of 2019’ ... isn’t as novel as you might think. ... Zheng- Li Shi, of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, ( is) a senior author of the draft paper that gave nCoV- 2019 its identity and name. It was Shi and her collaborators who, back in 2005, showed that the SARS pathogen was a bat virus that had spilled over into people. Shi and colleagues have been tracing coronaviruses in bats since then, warning that some of them are uniquely suited to cause human pandemics. ... When you’re done worrying about this outbreak, worry about the next one. Or do something about the current circumstances, ( which) include a perilous trade in wildlife for food, with supply chains stretching through Asia, Africa and to a lesser extent, the United States and elsewhere. That trade has now been outlawed in China, on a temporary basis, but it was outlawed also during SARS, then allowed to resume — with bats, civets, porcupines, turtles, bamboo rats, many kinds of birds and other animals piled together in markets such as the one in Wuhan, China.”
Frank Sieren, Deutsche Welle, Germany:
“The scale of Beijing’s measures so far is unprecedented. Only an authoritarian one- party state could have implemented them so rapidly: Some 56 million people are under quarantine and air, rail and long- distance bus traffic has been suspended in at least 14 cities. What is incredible is that there have been no demonstrations, let alone riots, in the regions affected. ... The situation was different with the 2002- 03 SARS outbreak: The scale of the epidemic was played down for months. By the time it had been brought under control, 800 people had died. Now, Beijing is providing information about the number of cases and casualties almost every hour. Even the construction of the new hospital is ... live- streamed.”