This is very like what happens in the book World War Z, which was probably inspired by government responses to SARS and other epidemics. A mysterious disease arises in China, and the government strongly censors reporting of outbreaks. This and other factors (people smuggling, illegal organ trade) contribute to its spread worldwide, and it is only when it cannot be contained that the world is aware and can start to understand and fight it.
As downvote-prone as that comment seems like it could be, I would like to add it it by saying that this can't be the right way to handle diseases. There has to be a sweet spot between telling everyone immediately, insighting a panic, and holding back all of the information.
I'm not too incredibly concerned with managing the information from the general public; but, the WHO and other people should always be immediately informed. In fact, if they were rapidly informed and we can get a cure out quickly, then the loss of life from these new diseases wouldn't be as bad, I would like to hope.
>There has to be a sweet spot between telling everyone immediately, insighting a panic, and holding back all of the information.
What if there's panic? It's not with a, say, earthquake prediction, where people would evacuate cities etc.
Rather, they'd stay at home more, avoid crowded places, avoid people looking sick, and wear those white mouth/nose masks more when out -- in all, that should help reduce the spreading of the dicease.
I was imagining my mental panic response for THIS instance:
- companies refusing to fly people back from Saudi Arabia to the United States
- us putting all people of the interested groups, for example, all Muslims and family members of anyone Arabic looking, into special hospitals to make sure they don't spread the disease, even if we don't have it.
- violent outrage if our family members end up sick, and there is a mosque down the road.
This particular article seemed to make it pretty clear that the yearly pilgrimage often results in illness from all the populations coming together with their own unique resistances. This particular pilgrimage, with these numbers, tends to be with a single population. That population could be seen as the source of the disease, and bad things happen.
That's the sort of 'panic' I'm thinking of and it's not good. Oh, and the reason I'm saying this level of panic is due to the currently estimated 56% death rate after extreme signs are shown.
> There has to be a sweet spot between telling everyone immediately, inciting a panic
I disagree. Perfect transparency is always the right way to go with epidemic diseases. That information will go through all kinds of natural filters: scientific journalists who can dispense useful advice, foreign governments that can refer to quarantine policies, and every day people who can make tradeoffs about the risks they're willing to face. Far worse is having a bunch of seemingly arbitrary restrictions imposed because of--in the minds of citizenry--some vague but clearly terrifying disease is killing people, but about which the populace has no useful information.
Cures don't really come out quickly, or even vaccines. The main way you stop a disease by preventing its spread, not curing it. So what ideally comes out quickly is guidelines and simple preventative measures. Watch for these signs and report them. Don't spend time around people coughing. Wear a mask. Etc. And people have to know that stuff if they're going to be part of the solution, not to mention the everyday medical professionals at your local hospital (with no connection to the WHO) who need to know who to isolate and what preventative measures to take. And of course they need to know how bad it is in order to prioritize it relative to other concerns. Concealing from people what's happening makes all of that harder.
We saw with SARS in the West that epidemics can be overblown, but there wasn't widespread panic and the widespread availability of information allowed people to choose how much to guard against it. I'd go so far as to say it's your right to overreact to accurate information. And in the end, it wasn't some magic cure that stopped SARS; it's was fast response and quarantine.
Anything other than complete transparency about public health issues is immoral.
Long term, I think the goal should be to improve the general public's response to information to the point where it's okay if everyone knows right away because they won't be stupid about it.
There's a problem with "getting a cure out quickly". For most diseases that's simply impossible - is there a cure for SARS yet? The best you can do is slow down the spread. If you detect it quickly enough hopefully you'll stop it.
Because if it leaks out that they have a new, lethal, incurable and contagious disease, they'll be treated like they have the plague. (See where the metaphor comes from?)
I moved to Singapore in 2003, when the SARS epidemic was raging. (IIRC, the last death in Singapore was the day I arrived.) People back home thought I was crazy, the usually crowded city-state's streets were rattlingly empty, restaurants had desperately promotions ($1/plate sushi etc) and the five-star hotel I'd been booked into at an already low rate bumped me to an apartment suite.
Of course, I was far more at risk of dying in a traffic accident, but "plague!" is one of those risk factors like "terrorism!" that makes people's hindbrains gibber in fear and discount all rational risk analysis.
It's a prisoner's dilemma. All countries are better off if everyone shares information, but there is a huge incentive to 'cheat' in this agreement.
News of an outbreak in a given country will have a substantial, negative economic impact. At the very least, tourism and trade will suffer. It's not unreasonable that other countries will quarantine and outright block off ties with the affected country.
Back in 2003 with SARS, Toronto Canada took a substantial hit in tourism dollars, so much so that the Rolling Stones stepped in to host a charity concert to help the city out... Chinese tourism was likely affected worse.
As a politician or public health official, crying wolf early or raising the alarm of a potential outbreak will certainly have a negative financial impact... what's not known is how serious a given outbreak might be. So in short, they are weighing a known, substantial cost (lost tourism) against an unknown and unquantifiable benefit (avoiding an outbreak)... being the political worms they are that got them into office in the first place, they will most likely take the route that provides the least direct blow-back to them, which is sadly the route of hiding the outbreak.
Some would argue the desire to censor is a disease of the mind. Or perhaps, a symptom of a mind plagued by fear of the unknown and shaken by the threat of new information.
It is refreshing, since 90% of the links I come by here about censorship are either about privacy, privacy expectation and influence on economy.
That way, nobody can say "I've done nothing wrong, so I'm not concerned".