Could we have prevented the pandemic?

There have been a number of viral outbreaks (not COVID-19) in the Far East that did not become pandemics. They were successfully contained and did not go global. So why did they fail to prevent the COVID-19 pandemic?

What allowed the outbreak to go global were passenger air flights out of Wuham to destinations around the globe, and then flights from European countries hit by secondary outbreaks to countries like the US. The countries in question are now beginning to close their borders and stop passenger flights but of course it's now almost too late.

So why did all the relevant countries not learn from past outbreaks and immediately stop all flights from Wuhan, and then as a further precaution block all flights from countries that had failed to stop incoming flights from Wuhan? It seems countries like the UK, for example, hadn't wanted to infringe on travellers rights to free movement and simply let the outbreak happen. They simply put the message out that anyone in the UK who had recently visited the Wuhan region should have a test done, in their own time....... A recipe for disaster.

Countries like the UK have also not done enough to contain the virus once the outbreak had started. Self isolation is still at present completely voluntary, though they are now thinking of changing this for people tested positive (though of course this should also include everyone with a cough and not just those tested positive). But so many people are openly flouting the rules. I myself have heard accounts of people coughing all over the place and being asked to leave nightclubs or convenience stores. But this is exactly how the virus is spread. Just one selfish person in a nightclub could potentially infect dozens if they were positive.

In the UK the government has set a target of 20,000 deaths from coronavirus. However the global death toll to date is less than 9,000 with populous China claiming to have almost completely defeated the virus. So where did the UK government get this figure of 20,000 from and why are they being so pessimistic?

The UK government has also talked of using "herd immunity" to tackle the virus. But for herd immunity to work 60% of the population has to get the virus and become immune. But if that percentage of the population gets the virus there won't be enough hospital beds to go around. And the death toll would actually be far higher than 20,000 and could be anywhere from between 380,000 to 1.1 million!

When contradictory information and procedure like this is made public you really have to ask yourselves the question whether our world leaders really know what they're doing.

 

Some virus's show themselves almost immediately. I would imagine that is why they were contained previously. The ones that are harder to contain are those that take awhile before any symptoms show, even longer before doctors realize what it is. That is the case with Covid-19. It can take up to 14 days before any symptoms show. In that time how many people left Wuhan and China to other countries? And in that process affected other people who then affected others and on down the line. Because of that containment like those you mention from the Far East was an impossibility really. The best we can do now is to contain it as much as possible via the guidelines set out. Space, washing hands, covering nose and mouth when sneezing etc etc.

 

Apparently the only new cases in China at the moment are from people travelling back into the country. This shows that closing borders does actually stop the spread of the virus and this is what many countries are now doing but of course far too late.

The procedure should be that as soon as you hear about an outbreak like this in a foreign country, all international flights from that country should be stopped immediately.

The first cases of COVID-19 in China occurred as early as 1st December 2019 but it was only towards the end of January 2020 that overseas cases were first reported.

That's far longer than 14 days.

 

Whatever Germany is doing when it comes to treating people with Coronavirus, we aught to be doing the same. Such a low mortality rate against people tested positive:

How is Germany controlling the Coronavirus outbreak?

 

The CIA should have been able to detect the presence of a spreading disease epidemic in China at least as far back as November of last year. But, either they didn't, or they did and everybody in government decided to just ignore it, hoping that it would just be a Chinese "thing".

After all, since nearly every damned thing we buy in OUR country is made in China (including 90% of our prescription medicines), we wouldn't dare to do anything to screw up anybody's corporate profits...?!

... and don't do anything to screw up your RETIREMENT!

 

China could have shut down the wet markets after the first SARS outbreak they started, and made it illegal to sell bats and/or wild animals (which are plagued with viruses from bats) as part of their food supply. They could at least have food inspectors for those products.

 

Actually it took decades to get common influenza even to the half-way point of containment the way we have it today. 22,000 have died in the USA from flu this season even with immunizations widely available. Fortunately the common flu is not nearly as contagious as the disease caused by the Chinese Wuhan Wet Market Virus.

Were the common flu equally communicable to the Wuhan Virus many of us wouldn't be here.

 

Heard on one of these interesting 'news analysis' programs last night that "we" knew as far back as last mid-November that the Chinese had detected a disease outbreak. I'm not sure exactly who the "we" was, but if anybody included in "we" was one of our intelligence agencies, then obviously the information went into the ditch for two months instead of being acted upon....

 

That was in the press a week or two ago. Some report leaked out of Beijing that documented the first case as happening November 17th. Our media indicated it was a "leak" that we didn't know about until recently....but government propaganda is legal in this country, so we never know if the government is telling the truth or not. We know not to trust most of the opinions which come from organizations which call themselves "news".