Are we overreacting to the coronavirus threat and merely creating bigger risks down the road?
- For a virus with a lower fatality rate than peak flu season in the US, millions are being quarantined, borders closed, flights cut and economic and political costs are mounting
- With human rights swept aside and public health politicised, are we creating more problems than we hope to solve?
Third, it may be dangerous to make assumptions given the experience of previous coronavirus outbreaks such as with severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers), as well as the worry that new viruses can exploit weak immune systems with few, if any, antibodies to defend an infection.
Meanwhile, more sober-minded experts worry, off the record, that China is shaving off numbers to keep the figures of those who have recovered far ahead of fatalities, and largely suppressing the number of deaths outside Hubei.
Nevertheless, while the outbreak is serious, with lives at stake, a comparison with other public-health concerns and available data suggests it is overblown as a health emergency.
For example, during the peak period in a “bad flu year” in the United States, such as in 2017-18, the case fatality rate for pneumonia and influenza was over 10 per cent, according to data from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Additionally, for this year: “The latest FluView surveillance from the CDC reports that as of January 18, 2020, there have been 15 million cases of flu, 140,000 hospitalisations, and 8,200 deaths in the US this influenza season”, including 54 paediatric deaths.
This disparity has been acknowledged in the US, and government officials have said the regular flu is a much greater danger for Americans and that they should not be distracted from this fact.
Furthermore, given the WHO’s declaration of a global emergency, what lessons might other countries draw from the Chinese response to date? These are difficult questions that beg even more difficult answers.
Public health law is based primarily on police power. Public health confidence is based primarily on public perception. In public health practice, generally, governments are not supposed to release or restrict information if doing one or the other might increase morbidity and mortality.
On social media, videos of authorities boarding up occupied homes have surfaced, and local blockades, even in rural villages have been reported. And this is just part of the impact on people in China.
It is too soon to judge whether the responses are balanced, heavy-handed or in some way insufficient, but it seems increasingly possible that they have created more problems than they are solving.
This might have been understandable given initial concerns, but the politicisation of both domestic and global health issues increasingly appears to serve contrary forces, and may run contrary to medical science and responsible public health practices, if available data is trustworthy.
Robert Dingwall’s much criticised call to “de-escalate the war on the coronavirus” in a Wired editorial might have been premature and provocative, and Roger Bate’s argument that this is a media-driven crisis is a bit overblown, but the discussion deserves more careful attention.
Unfortunately, stepping back from the brink in the midst of a crisis is hard, and it will pose a great many challenges and risks for this outbreak in China and beyond.
Josef Gregory Mahoney is professor of politics at East China Normal University in Shanghai