Steph
December 17, 2020 at 17:31#63462
The reason why the world panicked is that the initial data from China showed a very quickly multiplying infection and in a matter of a few weeks 86,000 individuals were diagnosed with just over 4000 deaths. The kinetics of the infection and the novelty of the virus revealed that this virus had the capacity to cause a pandemic. You do appreciate that this was a truly frightening situation, a new virus with no known immunity in the population with a mortality rate of about 5% and with an exponential spreading rate of doubling of a few days is extremely scary. You do not have to wait for this to be established to act. We have had similar scares with SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2012 but the outbreaks were contained because vigorous measures were taken. Now this is the crucial bit to understand because if you do not agree then it is futile to continue explaining, do you see why this is scary and why there was panic?