Am I the only person who isn't worried about the coronavirus? I'm not exaggerating when I say it hasn't effected my life at all, except for the effort it took me to write this comment. I live in San Francisco, if it matters.
It's always difficult to determine and conceptualize personal risk, but in this case, maybe even harder: people are caught between the extremes of "I'm healthy, and it's very unlikely to harm me", vs. "this may kill millions of people around the globe unless we get lucky, and/or are very serious about the measures we take to contain it". (Both of these statements are true [for most people] yet seem irreconcilable.)
So you staying at home and not getting the virus probably doesn't make much of a difference to you, aside from not feeling crappy for a couple of weeks. But if we all do it, then on a population scale it will make a difference, as it's one of the actions that can contribute towards preventing potentially millions of people dying.
You might not feel that you would ever be responsible for transmitting the virus to a vulnerable person who then dies, and that might be true... but again on a population scale, someone is responsible, and that infection could potentially have been prevented by this (and other) measures.
For older people, in particular, death rates for over 70s are truly worrying.
San Francisco just reported its first cases today, but there's definitely been panic shopping. The city closed down Lowell today as a precautionary measure (but that leaves nearly 200 campuses open).
Even if you don't suffer any health or financial effects (unlikely) you'll still be effected if:
- More schools close, even more if parents have to take time off from work en masse
- Public transit becomes a big vector and BART or Muni try to shut down or reduce service
- People continue to panic shop. NPR had a photo from a Marin Target with shelves bare of disinfectant wipes. Rainbow in the city was almost completely out of canned tomatoes on Monday.
- On a federal level, if our idiot president succeeds in closing the Mexican border you'll definitely feel some pain
Wait, is he trying to do that? Why is that his solution to everything?
However it turned out permanent and serious lung damage can occur even if the individual recovers from the disease. That certainly changed my perspective a bit. It would serve everyone well to err on the cautious side.
I am concerned however about the overreaction to the virus. Like I am not concerned about catching it, but I am having second thoughts about a holiday trip in south Asia I wanted to make next month as I don’t want to find myself jailed for weeks in a military barrack for some unnecessary quarantine. And my biggest concern is the economic impact.
Hopefully this thing will go away in 2/3 months as the northern hemisphere gets warmer.