This same tough decision-making process will play out thousands of times in the next few months.
Any event that draws an international crowd poses an elevated risk. You can't know where people have been or what kind of screening process has been applied. If you're planning on attending a tech conference with an international crowd, now is the time to reconsider.
The possibility of asymptomatic transmission through casual contact poses unprecedented challenges. As does the low number of cases on which to draw information from outside of China.
The problem right now is the extremely poor quality on the information around the disease. Maybe this thing will behave like other infections and "burn itself out" as summer in the northern hemisphere approaches. Maybe it won't. There's quite literally no way to know.
The disease has spread in places like Singapore and Thailand, which are warmer in February than most Northern Hemisphere cities are in summer. The notion that everything will just die down come Spring is blindingly optimistic.
Despite WHO-Philippines's warning that transmission in tropical/subtropical regions is possible, on February 7, the country only reports 3 cases. All resolved: 1 death, 2 recovered.
Influenza is a totally different virus though. That said, other corona viruses do tend to display seasonality but experts are uncertain about this latest one:
Outside of the behind the scenes stuff we can't know yet this thing is moving at a remarkably similar arc—save for the severity and fast incubation time of the virus in the film.
Any event that draws an international crowd poses an elevated risk. You can't know where people have been or what kind of screening process has been applied. If you're planning on attending a tech conference with an international crowd, now is the time to reconsider.
The possibility of asymptomatic transmission through casual contact poses unprecedented challenges. As does the low number of cases on which to draw information from outside of China.
The problem right now is the extremely poor quality on the information around the disease. Maybe this thing will behave like other infections and "burn itself out" as summer in the northern hemisphere approaches. Maybe it won't. There's quite literally no way to know.