On 26/02/2020 13:56, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
On Wed, Feb 26, 2020 at 8:42 AM Davey Song <songlinjian@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
What I can do to help the situation as a Chinese IETFer, is to cancel all
travel and stay at home....
Thanks to the Internet, I can participate IETF remotely. Good luck!
Davey
Exactly. The point I am not seeing raised here is whether it is a good idea
to hold an international meeting and potentially spread the virus further.
This is not just about us.
This may not turn out to be a re-run of SARS. A large amount of the
infrastructure that existed to deal with pandemics has been shuttered
since. The way our political elites manage risk is to observe when disaster
has been avoided and conclude that this shows the controls intended to
mitigate those risks were unnecessary.
A question that we may well have to consider is the possibility that Madrid
is cancelled by government fiat. We are currently in the complacency phase,
what will follow if matters continue is panic.
Phillip
The other point that I do not see is when; at what point must a decision
be taken lest costs escalate out of control. China has had New Year,
which may still create an upsurge of cases - every week I am on a campus
with 5,000 Chinese students - Europe has just had half-term which for a
number was skiing in Italy and Italy has just had a major surge so the
news at present is all about people in quarantine, hotels, cruise ships
and self-isolation. And the consistent message is that, unlike SARS,
the infection takes two weeks to incubate AND carriers are infectious in
that silent period.
So we need two weeks with no upsurge in cases before we can begin to
think that cases have stabilised. At present, cases are escalating and
somewhere in the not too distant future there is a deadline for making a
decision.
Tom Petch
