[Seenso]

You also have to take into account that China probably took the right actions, but their big failure was in timing them poorly. If they'd implemented travel restrictions before Chinese New Year, we probably wouldn't be talking about a pandemic right now.

[iforgotpassword]

Considering the lack of action, or the very delayed manner in which we, the West, start to put up measures to prevent spread, I very highly doubt so.

Consider the incubation time of 5 days avg, 14 days max during which you're already infectious. Even if China had reacted quickly, not trying to cover it up, we still wouldn't have known about that for a while. Even without the Chinese new year, I'm pretty sure given how dense and large Chinese cities are, this would have spread eventually either way. And I doubt the rest of the world would have reacted any different in that alternate reality than now. We still have travel with China and Italy today. Why would that have been any different had China handled that differently? It would have been slower, but it would have spread to other countries, I have no doubt about that.

[glic3rinu]

> Consider the incubation time of 5 days avg, 14 days max during which you're already infectious."

I have seen several comments like this on this thread suggesting people are contagious during the incubation phase. Do you have a source for this? AFAIK this has not yet been confirmed, other than perhaps a few anecdotal cases.

[toasterlovin]

Hindsight is 20/20. It’s hard to know ahead of time whether you should cancel your nation’s equivalent of Christmas + Thanksgiving because you have preliminary and incomplete information about a disease outbreak somewhere.

[mbesto]

Or, ya know, they coulda just prevented wildlife trade via regulation in the first place.

[Jommi]

Yes, we all know that once regulation steps in, the thing regulated is completely stopped!