Coronavirus Testing

Chestnut
We can't be sure when they shut down the city. More than likely those passengers had left already, plus if they changed airports ( as we had to) on the flight to the uk they probably left a while before the shutdown.

I can't imagine how difficult it would be to contain a virus with all the worldwide travel today. It could require severe restrictions on travel and huge inconvenience to some people but sure that is a price worth paying to prevent it crossing the world? I've always felt that restrictions are never sufficiently implemented and they should be. Remember Pauline Cafferkey, the nurse they let back into the UK who had Ebola?

Wuhan is in lockdown. I have a friend from there and she has been told not to try to travel home for Chinese New Year, the worlds biggest migration of people.

Those people will have left prior to the lockdown.

Oh brilliant. Now they're saying more than 2,000 people have flown in to the UK from Wuhan and they should seek NHS treatment if they feel unwell. You would think they were trying to spread disease; they never take adequate measures to protect us until it's too late and the infection has been distributed. The NHS has enough problems without dealing with this too. I'm sorry but this makes me really angry.

This idea of testing for a temperature at airports etc is ridiculous. You can be infected and infectious for about 48 hours before you show any sign of symptoms like fever.

Listening to some idiot in the government firstly insisting the deaths were mainly in the elderly (so that’s ok!) and that of course the UK is equipped to deal with this ???

Our NHS is already in crisis- was he serious?

However, this current outbreak ought to be used as a dummy run for developing good practice and swift responses to future global outbreaks. It is almost inevitable that something really sinister and deadly will eventually emerge from the filthy chicken or fish markets of China.

Aren’t the Chinese authorities overseeing the building of a new hospital right now? To be up & running in record time it seems.

Part of the problem in Wuhan is that the global health community still isn’t entirely sure what the coronavirus—2019-nCoV, more formally—actually is or how it works.

The best evidence so far is that the virus originated in bats, and transmitted first from an animal to a human in a “wet market,” a place where live animals are sold for food. And the virus has transmitted from humans at the market to other humans … but perhaps not from those humans to even more humans, and on and on.

If the virus doesn’t transmit well from person to person, that’s good news. If the virus doesn’t survive for long outside a person, or it takes a lot of virus to infect someone, or satisfy any number of other characteristics of a really pernicious epidemic—if this whole outbreak comes down to a point-source of transmission, that market in Wuhan, that’s all a relief, and it means that a quarantine is too big a hammer.

And an unpopular one, at that: The lockdown comes during New Year celebrations, when pretty much everyone wants to travel to be with family.

Perhaps it is time to re-introduce quarantine?

The extent of travel today is just ridiculous. Millions of people globe-trotting every day is going to cause big problems unless they find a way to lock down any emerging disease as soon as it appears. It's no good keeping the planes flying out of infected areas to all parts of the world!

Seems it’s too late. Disease response experts are having trouble figuring out what China’s public health officials plan to do here, how they’ll do it, or why.

In an outbreak, by the time you try something as ambitious as quarantining a megacity, it’s already too late to quarantine the megacity apparently.

It’s hard to trust the official line from China; one local estimate now puts the number of cases at more than 6,000. Experts worry that the epidemic is already out of control. And even then, a security services-enforced lockdown might only exacerbate things. “You literally can’t close down a city to close down a microbe,” said one health expert.

“All these things seem to me to be impossible. You’d have to have a police state.” And it’d confine the uninfected with the infected, a public health disaster in the making.

In the worst worst case, it wouldn’t just be a disaster for Wuhan, because the quarantine almost certainly can’t hold, and the disease has already jumped the fence. The only way to know who’s right is to wait for the data.

I am so worried about this. I said to hubby they need to contain it by closing down travel from there. It frightening especially for people with low immune system like myself ??.
So angry about this ?

The virus has a 5 day incubation period

I think the UK has been very lax in allowing people from mainland China through the airports on arrival here without even testing their temperature. One man said they were not screened at all here, just given a leaflet.

We have travelled through HK when other viruses have been rife and had our temperature tested before we were allowed on to an onward flight.

A bit of forward planning as soon as the virus was identified should have meant, no flights out of China until the virus was contained. A huge inconvenience I know but a quick diagnoses for some, not all as far as I know, as passengers arrive, will not define who is carrying the virus.

All precautionary measures should have been put in place to stop the virus spreading world wide.

What are the authorities/government in Britain doing to prevent an outbreak here? The usual, too little too late. It has already arrived! ?

Dr Hilary said that we need to know what ages the fatalities are to understand how virulent the virus is. If they are very young or old that is one thing, but if they are fit healthy adults then that is much more serious. At the moment this virus seems to be like a dose of the 'flu, in other words it may be fatal to vulnerable people but not everyone, but without accurate ages we don't know the full story.

We are booked to go to China in May! Would you go?

People can be as right as rain when leaving a country and not show any signs of illness whatsoever but a virus will be in the body manifesting itself into something a day or two later and will show itself when it's too late to do anything about it.

My guess is that it's been hanging around for longer than people realise and has already been spreading since before Christmas.

It does make you wonder what all us ladies have had with our coughing and spluttering since we all ? had our 'flu jabs before Christmas as the type of bug we seemed to have had was obviously not covered by the vaccination ? My thoughts.

I live in Edinburgh. So it is a bit worrying. There are a lot of Chinese students at Edinburgh university which is a prestigious university in world rankings.
The university can make a lot of money by charging them high fees. So I am not surprised that this is an entry spot for this virus.

Ditto in Exeter, Devon Chaitriona at the other end of the country.

I noticed on the news the reporter was in the thick of it interviewing the Chinese public. Why do they need to send anyone out there? Presumably he will have to come back to the UK. They could just report it without having to have “Our man on the spot”

On the news last night it was said that the outbreak wasn’t even mentioned on the Chinese news bulletins.

That is the mentality we are dealing with.

On the face of it they appear to be doing all they can by closing down the affected area, but we certainly can’t trust their official line on the numbers affected.

As was said on here though, we need to know more about those who died. Were they already sick or frail? It may turn out to be no more dangerous than flu.

Although people in China (on the news) all seem to be wearing masks Jennifer so they must know about it. The lack of bulletins on the news in China is probably because they are scared of causing panic in a country that size I imagine. The British guy on BBC video link from Wutan said the normally busy streets are empty. He lives there and is now trapped.

Many Chinese people are always out and about in masks, Chestnut, as are Japanese people.
Chinese people wear masks because of the pollution levels, too.

They definitely all know in China. It is all my Chinese friends are talking about and is all over Wechat, the Chinese social media platform.