Six on coronavirus: Coronavirus chaos lays bare the price of being a linked global economy; Blame China? Outbreak orientalism, from the plague to coronavirus; A History Of Quarantines, From Bubonic Plague To Typhoid Mary; Life in China Under Coronavi

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Six on coronavirus: Coronavirus chaos lays bare the price of being a linked global economy; Blame China? Outbreak orientalism, from the plague to coronavirus; A History Of Quarantines, From Bubonic Plague To Typhoid Mary; Life in China Under Coronavirus Lockdown; The deadliest virus we face is complacency; Coronavirus fears exposing the good, bad and ugly in people

Coronavirus chaos lays bare the price of being a linked global economy

Coronavirus chaos lays bare the price of being a linked global economy

Coronavirus chaos lays bare the price of being a linked global economy Fukushima, Sars and now the novel coronavirus are showing up the increasing vulnerability of global supply chain...

 Blame China? Outbreak orientalism, from the plague to coronavirus

"As the West’s horizon in Asia expanded beyond the Mongols to the Chinese, China became ground zero for epidemics. When the Third Plague Pandemic shipped out of Hong Kong in 1894 to infect much of the world, China was where everyone expected such disasters to arise. China wasn’t blamed for the Spanish flu of 1918-19, although according to Mark Humphries at Memorial University, new research may suggest that Chinese labourers working behind the lines in the First World War may have carried it to Europe. Outbreaks of the past quarter-century seem only to confirm China’s reputation for epidemics. The H5N1 strain of avian flu spread out of China in 1997, again via Hong Kong, killing more than half of those it infected. Five years later came SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome). Less lethal that H5N1, SARS managed to kill 1 in 10, producing a toll of 774 deaths. The current coronavirus appears to be less lethal than SARS, though the fact that we crossed the upper limit of SARS mortality a week ago, with the number still rising, is cause for concern."

Opinion: Blame China? Outbreak orientalism, from the plague to coronavirus

Opinion: Blame China? Outbreak orientalism, from the plague to coronavirus There are conditions in Asia that have left its people vulnerable to new and strange illnesses over the centurie...

`‘Should We Leave?’ Life in China Under Coronavirus Lockdown

Opinion |` ‘Should We Leave?’ Life in China Under Coronavirus Lockdown

Opinion | ‘Should We Leave?’ Life in China `Under Coronavirus Lockdown````````````````````````````````````````````````` We’ve stopped changing out of our pajamas, and the days seem to melt into each other.

Niall Ferguson: The deadliest virus we face is complacency

"I have seen a few rash commentators playing down the danger. But it is much too early to conclude, with Marc Siegel in the Los Angeles Times, that the coronavirus “does not currently pose a threat [outside China] and may well never do so.”

We don’t know enough yet to say how bad this will be. Among the things we don’t know for sure are the virus’s reproduction number (R0) – the number of infections produced by each host – and its mortality rate, or the number of deaths per 100 cases. Early estimates by the World Health Organization suggest an R0 of between 1.4 and 2.5 – lower than the measles (12-18), but higher than SARS (0.5). According to Johns Hopkins University, by Saturday there were 12,024 confirmed cases and 259 deaths, for a mortality rate of 2.2 per cent. But these numbers are likely to be underestimates.

The volume of air travel in China has ballooned since SARS. China’s 100 busiest airports last year handled 1.2 billion passengers, up from 170 million back then. Wuhan’s Tianhe airport was almost as busy last year as Hong Kong’s was in 2002. Disastrously, this outbreak came not long before the Lunar New Year holiday – the peak travel season – and the regional and/or national authorities were slow to acknowledge how contagious the virus was.

At the time of writing, a total of 164 cases have been confirmed in 26 countries other than China, including seven in the United States, four in Canada and two in the U.K.n other words, we are now dealing with an epidemic in the world’s most populous country, which has a significant chance of becoming a global pandemic.

But how big a chance? How big a pandemic? And how lethal? The bad news, as Joseph Norman, Yaneer Bar-Yam and Nassim Nicholas Taleb argue in a new paper for the New England Complex Systems Institute, is that the answers lie in the realm of “asymmetric uncertainty” because pandemics have so-called “fat-tailed” (as opposed to normal or “bell-curve”) distributions, especially with global connectivity at an all-time high."

Opinion: The deadliest virus we face is complacency

Opinion: The deadliest virus we face is complacency Whether or not this will be an epidemic of global proportions remains to be seen. The truth is we don’t know eno...

Coronavirus fears exposing the good, bad and ugly in people

Coronavirus in context                Cases                               Deaths

• Coronavirus

  Fatality rate: 2.2%
  37,580
  813

 

• US seasonal flu*

  Fatality rate: 0.07%
  13,000,000
  10,000
• Sars

  Fatality rate: 9.6%
  8,437
  813
• Mers

  Fatality rate: 34.4%
  2,494
  858
• Ebola

  Fatality rate: 43.9%
  34,453
  15,158
• H1N1

  Fatality rate: 17.4%
  1,632,258
  284,500

Source: China's NHC, state media, other authorities
*US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated data from 2019-20 Season

Coronavirus fears exposing the good, bad and ugly in people

Coronavirus fears exposing the good, bad and ugly in people Coronavirus fears exposing the good, bad and ugly in people

A History Of Quarantines, From Bubonic Plague To Typhoid Mary

A History Of Quarantines, From Bubonic Plague To Typhoid Mary

A History Of Quarantines, From Bubonic Plague To Typhoid Mary China's efforts to build a quarantine center for suspected Wuhan coronavirus patients is the latest chapter abou...