re: #327 Nojay UK

If it turns out this variant is a Bad Thing then panicking after it has got its nose in the door and spreading widely throughout a population is pointless. Panicking now and over-reacting and finding out later it was a nothingburger has a lower body count in the long run. In reality trying to contain this variant in southern Africa probably won’t work forever but it might buy the rest of the planet time to prepare for Bad Things happening and keep the resulting body count down.

Back when this mess kicked off in early 2020 I read an opinion piece written by an epidemiologist who had consulted on Ebola and worked on the original SARS coronavirus outbreak. What she said was, from memory, “[for this coronavirus] the only proper reaction is an over-reaction.”

The steps that are being taken now are, in my view, appropriate and do not constitute panic. The stuff the media is disseminating now is not, in my view, appropriate and is an invitation to panic.