COVID-19 Outbreak (Update: More than 2.9M cases and 132,313 deaths in US)

Yeah, agree. It might be something that the viral science can show is just too dangerous at this point (the numbers and the proximity are getting too high) and there can be pressure to end it.

But you can't say it's a source of fault for this outbreak - like you said, they're common around the world. The better focus is on China's initial response in the first few weeks (in December). Governments should be held accountable for failing to alert the world community about a new virus. We have avenues for it, alert the public-health agencies just as a good world citizen - and let the science steer the response. The early period is so critical, there has to be disclosure requirements.

What if the next one is in an African country fraught with corruption and factionalism - and it's a much worse virus? What if the next one is in China? We need a new global accord on emerging disease that focuses on early sharing of information. The WHO was supposed to be that structure but it's clearly broken.

I agree there need to be a better mechanism to deal with this issue. But in this situation, especially because we are dealing with China, I'm 100% sure that the U.S. and world intelligence community knew something was going on before any news reports came out and not long after the Chinese knew. Governments in at least the larger countries had the information to act, they just didn't. Whether that be because they didn't believe it, didn't appreciate the risk, or just cared more about protecting their economy, I don't know. But this focus on China is just a blame game to distract attention from the failures of other world leaders. The Chinese government certainly takes a large part of the blame here, but they aren't the only ones at fault.

But, you are right that if this happens someplace else, a place like some corner of Africa that has no strategic interests to the world intelligence community and is controlled by various warlords, it would get out of control much faster so steps need to be taken to monitor and have a faster world response to things like this in the future. The WHO was not prepared and didn't take proper steps. But the same can be said of our own CDC.