You are reading a single comment by @SwissChap and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
-
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
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.