“We didn’t have a lot of time, but this is what we practice for,” said Kim Saruwatari, director of public health for Riverside County. The question that’s remains is why the government imposed a quarantine now, when no such mandate has been issued in over 50 years, despite the outbreak of disease. The decision to quarantine does not align with the World Health Organization’s recommendations, which has advised against a travel ban, and the CDC said the decision to mandate a quarantine was unprecedented. She said that a major difference between the coronavirus outbreak and 2009’s swine flu outbreak was that the latter was already on American soil by the time an outbreak was confirmed. Advertisement“Part of the thinking with coronavirus is the hope that it would act more like SARS and MERS coronavirus, where the most contagious individuals were the sickest individuals.

Source: Los Angeles Times February 08, 2020 23:37 UTC