Coronavirus (COVID-19) Discussion Thread

[Nautilus]

Torillian said:
Our local public schools in Ann Arbor Michigan have closed for the next three weeks and the university has switched to online courses for the rest of the semester. We've only had two cases in the state so I'm surprised the public schools acted so quickly, I was expecting them to wait it out another week.

Someday I'd be really interested to talk to an expert on this particular virus and find out what about it made everyone take action so drastically. This is a much more notable reaction than I think the world has ever had for a single disease. Perhaps that's just because we have so much more information than we've ever had before, travel is easier than ever, or is this specific virus so much worse than Ebola or previous SARS strains that it required this level of response even if all other things were equal.

My personal opinion: Internet.

For better or for worse, the ease the information flows acts like a double edged sword.As you can see through the thread, people are easily scared, and that unfortunely has a gigantic impact on economy.So if the governments didn't implement these measures, they would be accussed of not caring about people enough, ending up causing a kind of damage that the virus wouldn't even come close to doing.In another words, people would panic more than they are now.

And you can already see the results:People floking to the markets to buy enough essencial products that could last months, investors pulling out their money and crashing stock markets through the world, people associating doing and not doing measures to political agenda(I think I have seen a thread about that yesterday), and so much more.

For better or for worse, the last big epidemic we had was the Swine Flu and while the death rate was smaller, its infection rate was much higher.And yet I don't remember the measures being taken to be this drastic.I might be misremembering though.