THE first reports of a troubling virus in China were on New Year's Eve, when Australia's attention was on bushfires.
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For those dramatic, horrific first few days of 2020 the world's focus was on Australia as it burnt. Reports of a virus in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people a long way from the Chinese coast, were relatively brief, even after reports of deaths.
Then suddenly the mystery virus was identified as a coronavirus, with the possibility that it was an animal virus that evolved to make humans ill. It is the evolution of an animal virus that can strike humans that made the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak of 2002 so serious, followed a decade later by the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).
The common cold is a coronavirus, but the coronavirus we know as SARS, and the current coronavirus, are worrying because of how quickly people can develop pneumonia and die.
The SARS outbreak of 2002 spread quickly to 30 countries. There were 8437 confirmed cases and 813 deaths. The MERS outbreak in 2012 was even more concerning. It rapidly spread to 27 countries and of 2494 confirmed cases, there were 858 deaths.
The focus of Australia has remained with the bushfires and their aftermath, and debate about where we go from here on climate change and adapting to the new threats we face.
But the threat of a coronavirus outbreak here has suddenly become real as people have returned from overseas holidays, or returned to work or school, only to realise they might have come in contact with it.
There are many who argue, quite rightly, that we have viral outbreaks all the time without the need for people to be quarantined or airlifted from other countries. The high death rate from the SARS and MERS outbreaks shows why we're not dealing with the common cold.
So far of more than 4000 confirmed cases from this recent outbreak there have only been 106 deaths. But this coronavirus's spread has been just as swift and extensive as the two earlier outbreaks, with cases already in Australia, and people quarantined in the Hunter.
We're all connected now, in a global sense. The ships that come and go from the Port of Newcastle are the most obvious sign of that. We're a multicultural nation and we like to travel. Which has its risks.
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