(01-25-2020 01:05 PM)Fo Shizzle Wrote: This virus has a 14 day incubation period. Unless you stop all travel from China into the US or quarantine those coming in for 14 days more cases will pop up and spread. Im for stopping travel until it is controlled.
The 2 week incubation period is only for symptoms though, from what I've read you're infectious the entire time. Without coughing and such its more difficult to spread but not impossible. Due to todays fast paced society with lots of traveling, our ability to contain it is almost nil.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51254523
Someone landing in SeaTac might take a taxi ride, might wipe their nose and then spread it to the door handle when they get out. Next person in that taxi might pick that up not knowing, eat a candy bar at the airport then fly to NYC. When they land in NYC they get a cup of coffee and some food at a local Starbucks and so on and so forth. By the time you figure it out its to late, by the time you have active infections you have potential incubating cases by the thousands, and it expands exponentially from there.
In the past we had geographic boundaries which kept plagues contained to a region. The first outbreak of the Black Death during the Roman era killed 25 to 50 million people... and that was with little to no travel. Now yes, health standards were much lower then, but people generally didnt travel as much, so the spread would have been much slower. These days, within 24 hours something can be spread around the world.
The other aspect of this is that even if a quick cure or treatment is found, with such a short viral life span and its rapid infection rate, mutations are bound to happen quickly which could render treatment less than 100% effective the wider the virus spreads.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/202...ed-chines/
If this is true, it may explain why China hasn't been honest about the severity of the issue.
I know some people want to pass it off due to the original source, but consider what you'd think if this was framed differently.
Imagine a breakout of a virus in Fort Detrick Maryland where the Gov has its BioWeapons Research Lab... and the US says 'Oh its no big deal, only a small issue..." and then the US Gov decides to quarantine multiple cites with lethal force and build emergency hospitals.
Tangential to this but related, experts have warned for a long time that if there is a new "superbug" of some kind that breaks out it'll almost certainly be from China, due to their overuse of antibiotics in animals. They piratically shovel the stuff into their livestock in massive amounts to compensate for the horrible living conditions that their livestock live in. Without it most of them will die. While this keeps animals alive, what it ends up doing is slowly creating stronger and stronger bacteria and virii as they adapt.
But in the last few years its gotten even worse as Doctors are over prescribing antibiotics to patients. China has never been one to care about the long term. They only focus on the short term goals. Medically this will be a disaster. Related Article:
https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opi...-bomb-asia
EDIT: Seems the incubation is 5 days as mentioned by later poster.