The coronavirus seems unstoppable. What should the world do now?

The global march of COVID-19 is beginning to look unstoppable. In just the past week, a countrywide outbreak surfaced in Iran, spawning additional cases in Iraq, Oman, and Bahrain. Italy put 10 towns in the north on lockdown after the virus rapidly spread there. An Italian physician carried the virus to the Spanish island of Tenerife, a popular holiday spot for northern Europeans, and Austria and Croatia reported their first cases. Meanwhile, South Korea’s outbreak kept growing explosively and Japan reported additional cases in the wake of the botched quarantine of a cruise ship.

The virus may be spreading stealthily in many more places. A modeling group at Imperial College London has estimated that about two-thirds of the cases exported from China have yet to be detected.

The World Health Organization (WHO) still avoided using the word “pandemic” to describe the burgeoning crisis today, instead talking about “epidemics in different parts of the world.” But many scientists say that regardless of what it’s called, the window for containment is now almost certainly shut. “It looks to me like this virus really has escaped from China and is being transmitted quite widely,” says Christopher Dye, an epidemiologist at the University of Oxford. “I’m now feeling much more pessimistic that it can be controlled.” In the United States, “disruption to everyday life might be severe,” Nancy Messonnier, who leads the coronavirus response for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned on 25 February. “We are asking the American public to work with us to prepare for the expectation that this is going to be bad.”

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/coronavirus-seems-unstoppable-what-should-world-do-now