Around 15% of the common cold is caused by a coronavirus. Pretty sure everyone has been infected at least once by a coronavirus, which is just simply a name for the group of viruses due to their characteristic "corona" (crown) appearance under the electron microscope. The specific one causing problems now is SARS-CoV-2.
I don't think the virus is a serious threat, but it's infectious enough it'd be good to learn how to deal with something that actually did pose a danger.
Going to disagree with that. This is a serious threat. The disease causes a flood of patients that can easily overwhelm the capacity of hospitals and is easily infectious enough to readily infect hospital staff and require them to be taken out to avoid infecting others. This means that you’re losing the capacity to deal with all the other medical emergencies that happen regularly and that means lives that wouldn’t have died will die from this disease.
k2NeXTTUNE said:
The worldwide outbreak of COVID19 shouldn't be simply attribute to China.The First outbreak center ,WuHan,has been sealed from Jan.23.Every citizen are prohibited to go outside and their living nessarities are provided by the government and volunteers.WuHan actually has a population of around 14 millions of people,so the action of locking down is a very risky move and it did create much casualties on economic but controls the situation . Now there are only 4k people in China were infected ,yet in America and Europe,the number of patients and deaths are quickly increasing.Maybe some people will say Chinese government has falsified the data,but according to what I have seen in Guangdong province of China,the epidemic situation has been controlled effectively and the price of face mask has dropped to around 0.15 USD for one.The war between mankind and COVID19 needs the cooperation of different countries and races.
My issues with China was that they created the conditions for this to migrate from their original host animal to humans through their exotic animal markets due to having a rather strong cultural belief that eating exotic animals gives you "strength" or other attributes related to what you eat. This is of course due to the beliefs of the mysticism of their traditional Chinese medicines (TCM). Furthermore the government will not have learned their lesson on this, because they're tying in on TCMs as a part of approved traditional Chinese culture and that being pro-TCM means being pro-China. They're "crack-downing" on these markets for food, but they'll just leave the door wide open for these same markets for their medicines. Which is a growing business in China and something that their government has been heavily trying to push into other countries. Even being a major part of their "Belt and Road" initiative. In fact their government is using COVID-19 to be able to make further claims that TCMs work and mandated that TCMs had to be made a part of the treatment nationally for COVID-19, which in turn they're now using to push out "studies" that "prove" TCMs work.
Furthermore China manufactured something like 80% of the masks worldwide, and who knows what percentage of the ventilators. It's easy to make readily available the equipment and lower the prices when you're making probably most of the world's supply of these devices. It was smart on them to lock the exports of these things for their own use, but I find it rather insulting when people think there is any "good will" when China "donates" supplies to other countries to fight COVID-19. It's easy to donate supplies when you control the market on those supplies, and it's very easy to be out and low on those supplies when you gave up your production base to China to save on costs.