I can't believe that seemingly intelligent people in this forum and elsewhere continue to believe that this isn't extremely serious and still want to compare it the annual flu!
You have completely misunderstood what I and others have said.The point is that
flu is dangerous: very deadly pandemics occur about three times a century. We have not had a really bad influenza pandemic for decades now, and that is probably why people like you think that flu is not extremely serious. The average death toll from influenza is over half a million dead, worldwide,
each year. It is worse than a regional war!
My point is that we, as a species, are behaving exactly like the idiots who build cities on a flood plain, and then run around panicing when the next bad flood comes along. We live on a planet with a LOT of dangerous things, and influenza and coronaviruses are among the things we should be prepared for.
While
most annual flu seasons are "mild" -- you know, mild, like conventional war among a handful of countries --, every now and then a nasty variant comes along and kills a measurable fraction of the total human population.
There is nothing surprising, nothing exceptional, in this coronavirus pandemic. It, or something like it, was fully expected; just not when or which virus.
The Chinese response to the outbreak is absolutely commendable. In the aftermath, if we ignore the circle-jerking politicians congratulating themselves how well they managed the situation, we'll find that while the Chinese response was drastic, it was the most efficient course of action, both in human lives and in financial terms. The question, that will not be answered in public in the West, is why we did not do the same, and why we haven't planned well enough for this even though we knew that this will happen -- just not when --, and that all signs point to this not being nearly the worst kind that we should be ready to expect. (And don't tell me "we cannot", because we bloody well can.)
Like influenza, this coronavirus spreads mostly via droplets in exhalation. If people wear a scarf or anything in front of their mouth, they drastically reduce the amount of virus-laden droplets they spread. If people also wear gloves, without touching their face (or exhaled droplets) with those gloves, they minimize the spread of the virus. Because it looks like a major part of the spread occurs before the person realizes they are infected, it is
crucial that people who believe they are healthy behave as if they were infected, and try to avoid spreading the virus through droplets in their own exhalations.
If everyone did this, the pandemic would be over in three weeks.The reason social isolation and self-quarantine is recommended, is that it works better than the above. A single person is smart, but people are stupid as hell; you'd always have the one Typhoid Mary who thinks they don't have the virus, and do shortcuts that keep the infection spreading. You know, the sly wipe of the nose, or cough in your gloved hand, when nobody is looking. The only thing that works with stupid, is making stupidity harmless; and that's what isolation does.
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