Where are the sick passengers??
We have reports from around the world about how Chinese people with coronavirus have been put in quarantine due to testing positive for the virus or being sick with it. It includes some from a tourist group now on the Gold Coast. All these people traveled on planes in close contact to others.
Now we know the virus spreads very easily because of the 61 people that have tested positive on the cruise ship in Japan, all stemming from one Hong Kong man.
So how come there are not hundreds or even thousands of people that caught the virus on planes??
The answer is actually quite simple. To be tested for the virus, people get asked 2 questions. Have you been to China recently? Have you been in close contact to a person known to have coronavirus? Answer no to those 2 questions, and a person with common cold or flu like symptoms is currently NOT going to be tested for coronavirus.
They tested 273 people on the ship, most showing no symptoms. Only if you had a fever at the airport would you get tested.
This virus also obviously takes a lot more time to badly effect some. For example, the 34 year old healthy doctor in China, caught the virus off one of the patients he was treating in December. It took until the end of December for him to recognise a pattern and put it out to a web chat forum (how long? we don't have that detail). It was around another fortnight before he was hospitalised with symptoms, then another 4 weeks until he died.
It is possible that he caught the virus a month before he was hospitalised, and for some of that time he would have likely been infectious. The problem of this virus is that there are many unknowns..
However the list of 'knowns' is going up.
It is highly contagious, evidence 61 passengers on cruise ship being tested positive from 1 known source.
It can kill young healthy people, evidence being 1, 34 year old healthy doctor.
It is contagious when people appear asymptomatic, evidence Chinese women that spread virus to people in Germany.
It continues to be contagious after someone recovers, evidence German man that had mild symptoms, recovered, returned to work and spread virus among co-workers.
My hope is the official numbers from China are hopelessly wrong and that millions in Wuhan have already caught the virus and had only mild or minor symptoms, therefore not recorded. Given these millions, then those hospitalised, or dead are really only a very small proportion of those infected, and the numbers coming out of Wuhan will rapidly decline over the next couple of weeks.
My fear is that this is going to get a lot worse because there are already hundreds or even thousands of people here in Australia (and the rest of the world for that matter), that are already infected, think it is just a cold because they have not entered the bad late phase; yet.
My suspicion is that a lot more testing of people at airports in particular, would show a lot more cases. Also testing for those with a fever only, is just too little, too late.
All the official news is that it is NOT time to panic. Can anyone remember when the official word came out that it WAS time to panic??
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