[_Jim]

Hong Kong style panic ...

Oh PLEASE - pure panic does not allow for rationality in the decisions to isolate, treat and track those who may have contracted as insidious (YES, insidious) disease such as SARS.

Tell me - do YOU do *your* best work in a panic-state?

[EternalHope]

The best way to guarantee panic is to convince people you are lying when you tell them not to panic.

That is one of the problems in China today: The government has been caught in so many lies that nothing they say is believed.

[JasonC]

In Hong Kong, they sealed buildings, sent people to isolation, sold out masks, people wear gloves, DVD rentals and instant noodle sales are soaring because everyone is staying in, eateries are thinly settled, hotels are empty - all for a disease that has only hit a few hundred and killed a mere handful. That is "panic" by anybody's measure.

And it has worked. New cases in the last 10 day generation period are running about 100, one fourth what they were at their peak. This is a disease with the potential to spread exponentially, and instead it went linear in 20 days and its absolute rate of transmission has been quartered less than a month later.

Meanwhile in mainland China, they didn't want people to panic, so the told nobody the truth, and they've got 3000 cases and it is still growing exponentially. Sometimes "remaining calm" is just plain stupid. There is nothing to be gained by underreacting to this, beyond a little tourism for a month or two. There is an enourmous upside to overreacting to it - the eventual scale of the epidemic can potentially be lowered by many orders of magnitude.

If you can lose your head while all about are keeping theirs... Works in market bubbles too, by the way.