Fear and uncertainty as coronavirus outbreak spreads

What happened

Public health officials in China and the West scrambled to slow the spread of the new coronavirus this week, amid growing fears that a global pandemic may be impossible to stop. The respiratory illness has so far infected more than 75,200 people and killed at least 2,006; more than 98 percent of all cases have occurred in China. Authorities there said the spread of the epidemic appeared to be slowing, but with the number of cases outside China surging, health experts warned against optimism that the disease might be peaking. At least 47 infections have been reported in Europe and more than 70 in Japan. Pandemic fears jumped after the Westerdam, a cruise ship that was repeatedly turned away from Asian ports over coronavirus fears, disembarked more than 1,000 passengers in Cambodia. Those passengers then headed to airports; one, an American, tested positive upon reaching Malaysia. “This could be a turning point,” said William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University.

A second cruise ship docked in Japan, the Diamond Princess, reported more than 600 cases. Some 300 Americans on board, including 14 who’d tested positive, were airlifted to U.S. military bases, where they will be quarantined for two weeks. That brought the number of confirmed cases in the U.S. to 29, but experts say the total number is likely far higher. Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the FDA, told Congress that the U.S. is detecting “25 percent of cases at best.” Asha George, head of the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense, said the country may ultimately see “hundreds of thousands of cases.”

What the editorials said

The virus has unleashed a “political maelstrom” that threatens Chinese President Xi Jinping, said the Financial Times. In an unprecedented display of defiance, ordinary Chinese have vented their anger online over the government’s mismanagement of the crisis, silencing of whistleblowers, and willingness to lie “to its citizens to save face.” Beijing’s authoritarian might and ability to marshal resources on a vast scale have lifted millions of its citizens out of poverty. But as wealth grows, people “thirst not only for material well-being but also for dignity.”We face “many huge unknowns” about the virus, said The Guardian (U.K.). We don’t know how long it lingers on a contaminated surface, for example, or how infectious people are before showing symptoms of the disease. But uncertainty is no excuse for inaction. Now is the time to take measures to head off “pandemics that could catch us off guard in the future.” We could start by improving health services in poor areas of Asia and Africa. “Outbreaks of deadly new diseases—wherever they emerge—are not someone else’s problem.”

What the columnists said

If a coronavirus epidemic hits the U.S., it “could bring out the worst in President Trump,” said Peter Nicholas in TheAtlantic.com. Having already stoked fears about disease-bearing foreigners, he would likely “double down on xenophobic suspicions” during an outbreak. He’ll need a sturdy bureaucracy to stop the virus’ spread, but over the past three years he’s “hollowed out federal agencies and belittled expertise.” Should a pandemic land on our shores, we’ll learn the hard way that “tweets don’t beget vaccines.”

To know if we are facing a pandemic “we need answers to two basic questions,” said Julia Belluz in Vox.com. How deadly is the virus, and how easily does it spread? Studies suggest a “reproduction number”—how many people a sick person is likely to infect—between 2 and 3.11. That’s higher than the flu or SARS. But figures from China indicate the virus’ mortality rate is about 2.3 percent; that’s far below SARS’ 10 percent mortality rate. Still, at this early stage these numbers are just “informed guesses.”

“However much we’d like to know everything right now, we just don’t,” said John Allen Paulos in The New York Times. Accurate infection counts are notoriously tricky; people who experience the virus as a mild cold, for example, won’t go to the doctor. Fatality rates can also be hard to determine—the virus might be blamed for the deaths of vulnerable people suffering from serious conditions such as diabetes. We have to “accept the discomfort” of our uncertainty. “Which is all the more reason to abide by one of the things we do know at this point: You should wash your hands regularly.” ■