I'm Sure It's Nothing to Be Concerned About, Redux

The same government that expects this:

The federal government is instead focused on having international travellers flying into Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver who are experiencing flu-like symptoms self-report to border officers, Tam said.

Cannot reconcile this:

For the second time in 17 years, Canada’s largest city has become this country’s ground zero in the fight to contain an outbreak of a newly identified organism that is spreading worldwide.

A Toronto man in his 50s was confirmed Sunday as Canada’s first presumed case of the rogue virus known as 2019-nCov, a coronavirus that surfaced in the Chinese city of Wuhan on New Year’s Eve. Officials are urging calm as they work to contain the illness in Canada and rapidly trace passengers who were seated within a two-metre radius of the man, who was already experiencing symptoms when he boarded his transoceanic flight home to Toronto.

The man said during airport screening that he’d been in the province where the virus originated and had a “mild cough,” but was allowed to go on his way, Dr. Theresa Tam, head of the Public Health Agency of Canada, said Monday.

**

Canada’s first presumptive case of the novel coronavirus has been officially confirmed, Ontario health officials said Monday as they announced the patient’s wife has also contracted the illness. Meanwhile, 19 cases are under investigation in the province.

And sure as hell won't explain this:

In what is a very disturbing revelation, it has been revealed that Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, her husband Keding Cheng, and some students from China, were removed from Canada’s Level 4 virology lab in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

**

In a table-top pandemic exercise at Johns Hopkins University last year, a pathogen based on the emerging Nipah virus was released by fictional extremists, killing 150 million people.

A less apocalyptic scenario mapped out by a blue-ribbon U.S. panel envisioned Nipah being dispersed by terrorists and claiming over 6,000 American lives.

Scientists from Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) have also said the highly lethal bug is a potential bio-weapon.

But this March that same lab shipped samples of the henipavirus family and of Ebola to China, which has long been suspected of running a secretive biological warfare (BW) program.

Also:

The actual information presented at the conference, featuring Health Minister Patty Hadju and Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, can be summed up concisely. The patient, a man in his 50s, had recently returned to Toronto from China. He was showing symptoms while on the flight to North America, but still got through the enhanced screening in place at Pearson International Airport. He went home and, a day later, to hospital, where he was immediately isolated. The various public health agencies have been communicating well, the patient is isolated at Toronto’s excellent Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, biological samples from the patient are being immediately analyzed, with results expected by Monday, and public health officials are working quickly to identify and contact anyone who was sitting near the man on the transoceanic flight. The patient is, by all accounts, doing well in hospital. His family members are being monitored.

It all sounds reassuring. That was certainly the point of the entire exercise. “The risk (to the broader public) is low,” was the unofficial slogan of the entire event. But the reassuring words about co-ordination and communication can’t hide the awkward truth — the “system” the officials were so cheerfully describing didn’t work. A man flying back from an epidemic hot zone — and who was actively symptomatic upon arrival at an airport that was on the alert — was screened by officials who were fully aware of the danger … and who then let him into the country.

That’s the failure here. That’s the issue of concern. Everything else that happens afterward — the immediate isolation of the patient, the rapid testing of his samples, the strong communication among health agencies — is nice but not the point. Lauding the emergency response after a preventable incident rings hollow when the point is to avoid the emergency in the first place.

That didn’t happen here, and it probably can’t. We have to be realistic. Any system that relies on honestly and self-reporting by people with a strong reason to lie (in this case, to get the hell back into Canada) isn’t going to be 100 per cent effective. That’s not the government’s fault. The grim truth is that what we know so far about this still-unnamed virus suggests that it’s going to be difficult to contain, if not impossible. The Chinese experience so far shows that it can spread rapidly. The precise rate has yet to be determined, but experts currently estimate that every infected person infects approximately 2.5 other people, though it’s important to note that that’s a mathematical average, not a real-life certainty for each individual case. More concerning is the fact that patients afflicted with the Wuhan virus are apparently contagious before they present any symptoms. For perhaps as long as days.

Let that sink in. People can be infecting others before they realize they themselves are sick.

Uh, no.

There are a lot of things the government can do to get ahead of this. One thing they can do is remove their heads from their bottoms. The next thing they can do is restrict flight from China, quarantine anyone who was anywhere near affected people, set up more stringent controls at airports and penalise those non-self-reporting people you know damn well could be incubating this.