Coronavirus: From A Scare In Shanghai To A Quarantine In Georgia

[freemexy]

Before traveling to China in late January, Holly Bik and her husband watched countless news reports and read as much as they could about the novel coronavirus, which had been detected in the country a few weeks earlier.To get more news about quarantine in shanghai, you can visit shine news official website.

Bik’s husband is from China. (She prefers not to publicize his name because of the sensitive situation in his homeland, but he is on an academic fellowship at the University of Georgia.) The couple, who live in Athens, had their first baby last June, and wanted the infant to meet his great-grandfather, who was recovering from surgery in a district called Qingpu, a suburb of Shanghai.

Qingpu is about 500 miles east of Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak. And as the family contemplated their trip, it still appeared that the virus was mostly confined to the Wuhan area.After weighing the odds, the couple went ahead with their travel plans. Things would be fine, they figured. They weren’t going to the heart of the outbreak.

“We worked with the best information that we could have at the time,” said Bik, an assistant professor of marine sciences at UGA.But the coronavirus situation degraded rapidly even as they were flying from Atlanta to China.

“It wasn’t until we actually had gotten to China that everything blew up in the media, and … the scale of the problem really became apparent,” recalled Bik.As the disease spread and caused more deaths in China, the government there began taking more active measures.

Bik, her husband and their 8-month-old son soon had to scramble to find a way back to Georgia, where they then spent 14 days quarantined inside their Athens residence.The Georgia Department of Public Health says that, at any one time, about 200 people are quarantining themselves in the state due to recent travel that may have exposed them to the novel coronavirus, which is now officially known as COVID-19.

On Monday, Gov. Brian Kemp said two people in Fulton County had tested positive for the virus. One, identified as a 56-year-old man, recently traveled to Milan, Italy, where there is a significant outbreak. The other is his 15-year-old son.

An outbreak of respiratory disease first detected in China in late December was traced to a new kind of coronavirus. Since then, people have tested positive for the disease in more than 70 other countries. Symptoms are similar to the flu, and people may experience fever, cough and shortness of breath. The severity of the disease can vary widely.

There have been more than 120 confirmed cases in more than a dozen U.S. states, including Georgia, Arizona, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Washington and Wisconsin. Most of the people who have tested positive for coronavirus in this country were connected to overseas travel. Eleven deaths have been reported in the United States as of Wednesday, and globally the disease has been deadly in about 3% of those infected.

As more people test positive in a growing number of countries, public health experts are bracing for a broader impact in the United States.

“It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in the country will have a severe illness,” said Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The focus to date has been on containing the spread of the disease by limiting travel to affected regions, identifying and isolating people showing symptoms, and asking travelers who may have been exposed to COVID-19 to voluntarily isolate themselves, as Bik’s family did.

Americans should start developing plans for what to do if authorities take more drastic steps against the disease, like the closing of schools and canceling of public gatherings, Messonnier said in a briefing in late February.

“I understand this whole situation may seem overwhelming and that disruption to everyday life may be severe,” she said last week. “But these are things that people need to start thinking about now.”Bik and her family have had a preview of what could happen here — although there’s no certainty that it will.