1. Folks, a while back I said there was no need to run for the hills after China first started reporting the mysterious pneumonia like illnesses in Wuhan. I still maintain that but I am now more worried. nytimes.com/2020/01/15/wor…
2. First of all, these patients in Thailand and Japan say they have had no exposure to the Huanan seafood market that China says is at the epicenter of all the cases. This suggests that the virus is spreading in Wuhan.
3. They started displaying symptoms days after the market was shut. The woman in the Thailand case said she went to another market so she could have been exposed to the source of the virus, likely a mammal.
4. The details of the case in Japan are even more alarming. The man said he did not visit any market in Wuhan and Japanese health authorities say it is possible that he had contact with a person with a lung infection.
5. All these suggest there could be some form of human to human transmission going on, though this new disease is not as virulent and deadly as SARS.
What we still don’t know: the source of the virus and the transmission route. The problem with eradicating the source is that there are many illegal animals at these markets, as Malik Peiris notes, so they will be hard to track down.
6. Of course all this is happening days before the spring festival. 30,000 (!) Chinese tourists are set to arrive in Thailand. Numbers likely similar throughout the region. Governments in Asia must be worried. END.
Correction: I missed a zero. Thailand expects 300,000 (!) Chinese tourists during the lunar new year period.
