Nice how you cut off the rest of what I said mid-sentence. You remind me a great deal of the lying panic causing media. The media along with politicians have managed to create worldwide panic over a flu like variant that is currently not on track to match the 2018-19 season. This is the worst lunacy that I have ever seen or could have imagined. Thanks to the cheerleading from cowardly idiots who claim to be conservatives it keeps getting worse.
I spent 25 years with my crews transporting people sick with contagious illnesses to the hospital in the back of cramped rescue units. I called my best friend who is currently a battalion chief on the department I used to work for... he said that they were exhausted responding to calls from people who in many cases had no symptoms but were convinced that they had the virus.
My wife is a retired nurse and I am a retired fire officer we live in East King County where we have hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants. Tens of thousands of them went home for “Chinese New Year” which is like Christmas for them. Over ten thousand of them came back after the “travel ban” by flying into Vancouver BC and taking the bus home. This thing has been circulating here since the end of December. It went unnoticed until it hit the vulnerable people at the Life Care Center in Kirkland which we have visited many times the last few years.
It is pathetic that those people were able to circumvent the travel ban so easily.
However, if one believes the statistics, the CFR (Case Fatality Rate) of this disease is 10 or 20 or 30 times worse than the common flu, and because of our lack of immunity to this, containment is needed. This is the expert opinion of every single virologist and epidemiologist who has chosen to opine on it. Some countries have disregarded those warnings knowingly or unknowingly, and the results can be seen in Italy and Iran.
This is at its heart a mathematical and statistical game. The virus will expand at a certain rate, and increase infections and deaths at a certain rate that exceeds the flu. One must figure out what to do about it, and each country has chosen extremely constrictive containment measures at great political and economic cost.
All of these are facts stated not by politicians and media figures, but by medical experts (virologists and epidemiologists) in the major countries. The politicians and media figures are repeating what the medical professionals are saying about this. So this is not driven by politicians, but rather by medical advice.