The disease has now spread to places outside of China, which means that the Chinese authorities no longer are in charge of the overall narrative. If the Chinese have misinformed the public, we will know this pretty soon. We will get mortality rates and rates of contagion that either confirm or contradict the Chinese numbers.
What caught my attention a few days back when I started to follow this more closely, was a deviation of narrative from previous scares, such as SARS, Bird flu, Swine flu and Ebola. In those cases, national and international authorities have tended to emphasize the severity of the outbreak while simultaneously claiming that things are under control: That there are vaccines and that everybody will be fine if we just obey whatever government health authorities demand. Importantly, previous cases have had catchy names. In this new case, the decease was simply the coronavirus. But coronavirus is not a name, it's a type. Most colds and flues are caused by coronaviruses.
The current outbreak follows a different narrative. We were repeatedly told that this is nothing to worry about. Everything is fine. The disease is contained. It does not communicate between people. If we just stop eating bat or snake soup, everything will be fine. But the panic laden actions taken by Chinese authorities a few days back was pretty much proof positive that things were far from contained. The rhetoric changed. We were suddenly faced with something severe. Yet there's still no word of any vaccine. There's also a blame game going on. People are pointing fingers. Scapegoats are found, such as bloggers promoting strange and unusual foods. The narrative is rapidly shifting. There's no central control of what people are being told. All of this indicate that the situation is the result of something completely unforeseen. Some accident in a government bio-lab, perhaps.
By Jean-Pierre from Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire (Nièvre, Burgundy region), France - Chemistry laboratory, detail, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link
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