Coronavirus - How worried should We be ?

I have lived in China for more than 16 years, I was there both during the outbreak of SARS in 2002, the bird flu and the swine flu. Still the corona virus has made me more worried than any of the above, and now I’m living back in Sweden. Let me tell you why.

During the Sars outbreak I had just moved to China. From what I can remember I did not get especially frightened, which was weird, because the mortality rate of this virus was more than 10 percent. Still, I did not get the sense of a panicked state. Of course this could also have been due to the fact that I was young and naive, feeling immortal like many teenagers do. But during the SARS outbreak I do not recall a lot of people wearing face masks, or people being on edge in general.

The swine flu and the bird flu were more scary to me. Especially the swine flu, because this was going on when I went to university in China. I remember one day, the school suddenly told all students that we would have to get a shot. I had already heard that there were cases where people had adverse effects to the vaccine, so this made me a bit apprehensive. On the other hand I didn’t want to be the only one who said no to receiving the shot, I don’t even think it would have been possible for me to avoid getting the vaccine.

So, telling you about these stories and experiences, why am I now even more worried about this outbreak than before when I actually lived in China? The reason is because of what happened today at work. We have a purchasing office in Hangzhou, China, and in the afternoon my boss came up to me with a serious look. He asked me if I heard about the most recent updates of the situation in China. I said, yes, they quarantined all of Wuhan where the outbreak started. He said, “yes, but there is more, now they are canceling all large scale new year celebrations in Beijing” The country has run out of face masks for protection and therefore the government has asked the people working in this industry to go back from holiday and start up production again. It might seem weird that I reacted so much to this as opposed to news that Wuhan got travel restrictions. The reason why it made me scared is because, nothing is bigger than the New Year in China, if they cancel these new year events in the countries capital, I get a feeling that the virus is much more dangerous than we might know. If the government goes as far as canceling public events in one of the biggest cities in the world and setting up traveling bans in cities with population of several million people than trust me the situation is extremely serious.

Getting these news I opened up CNN and checked for more news, and it turns out there are already more than 600 cases. It is spreading fast and currently only Only three Chinese regions have not reported coronavirus. See map below:

When we know that there are atleast 600 reported known cases I am pretty sure we can multiply that number by a lot to get the true number. This epidemic is happening at the worst possible time which is also a reason that makes me very concerned. Chinese New Years is the largest human annual migration of all. During this period passenger-journeys will amount to almost three billion! Some experts are talking about a risk for the virus to mutate creating even a higher risk.

Despite that this outbreak is in the most populous country in the world and during the worst time it is good to see how the Chinese authorities are handling the situation and taking fast measures to handle the situation and communicating with other countries ! I feel sorry for all the people in China who were looking forward to a nice relaxing time with family to celebrate and I wish for everyone to stay safe and hopefully this virus can be beaten soon !