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https://www.wired.com/story/could-the-us-contain-a-coronavirus-outbreak/
For weeks, the world has watched as China has taken increasingly extreme measures to try to slow the spread of a deadly new coronavirus that emerged there in December. As diagnoses of the disease, named Covid-19, exploded in late January, Chinese officials took the unprecedented step of locking down the regions of Hubei province at the center of the epidemic. Since then, tens of millions of people have been living under government-imposed quarantine, forced to stay in their homes or rounded up into makeshift field hospitals.
Disease-response experts in the US have puzzled over these escalating efforts—a public health playbook ripped from the era before drugs and vaccines (and air travel). There’s no evidence, they’ve said, that such large-scale quarantines will work. But now, a delegation of international experts dispatched to China to assess the effectiveness of its aggressive response has reached a different conclusion. And as new cases have surged outside of China in recent days, public health officials in the US are contemplating whether they’ll have to go to similar lengths.
For weeks, the world has watched as China has taken increasingly extreme measures to try to slow the spread of a deadly new coronavirus that emerged there in December. As diagnoses of the disease, named Covid-19, exploded in late January, Chinese officials took the unprecedented step of locking down the regions of Hubei province at the center of the epidemic. Since then, tens of millions of people have been living under government-imposed quarantine, forced to stay in their homes or rounded up into makeshift field hospitals.
Disease-response experts in the US have puzzled over these escalating efforts—a public health playbook ripped from the era before drugs and vaccines (and air travel). There’s no evidence, they’ve said, that such large-scale quarantines will work. But now, a delegation of international experts dispatched to China to assess the effectiveness of its aggressive response has reached a different conclusion. And as new cases have surged outside of China in recent days, public health officials in the US are contemplating whether they’ll have to go to similar lengths.
