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I think the medical etc. professionals know what they have to do and I trust them to respond to the threat as required.
There obviously is a huge response happening to this, but dealing with any viral outbreak inevitably involves a lot of unknowns. Even for the regular annual waves of flu that circle the globe the transmissability and lethality of the viruses isn't known immediately. With a completely novel virus, we have even less idea. The problem is that while we're trying to work that all out the virus is spreading into a larger pool of people, who might travel and pass it on. Also, the more people it's in the greater the possibility that it will mutate and become more transmissable or more lethal.
ffm-
Sure. I'm not suggesting there should be no news stories about it. But I personally know a number of people who are in a pretty immediate state of alarm due to the CORONAVIRUS headlines without being able to put it in any type of context, my grandmother included - to them it isn't a case of "we don't really know how this is going to work out", it's a case of "this is something I personally should worry about a lot right now", which is just not (yet?) the case in Europe.
I'm all the more annoyed about it as some pretty bad news about the climate, where projections about the future are a lot more solid, are mostly met with deafening silence.
SwissChap
That's exactly my point. Right now, we don't have any final statistics about it, however what we do know so far - according to virologists - does not make it sound like it'll end the human race.
I don't think anyone is arguing that it's "not a big deal" as such. Just that there is maybe no reason to report about it on the level it is being reported on. Because again, many thousand people can die in a bad flu year in the UK alone and yet we don't see constant frontpage headlines about it. And that's not comparing apples to oranges - it's very directly comparing apples to apples. It just seems very disproportionate, and there are way too many people just staring at the "x people dead" number and freaking out about it.
I think the medical etc. professionals know what they have to do and I trust them to respond to the threat as required. For us 'normal people' in London (or generally in Europe) currently there is nothing we can do, or do differently. I don't like the undertone of "Don't panic, but we'll make sure to report about it in a way that makes it seem like maybe you should panic anyway" in some of the media.