Now it seems healthcare workers are readily getting infected.

"A study has found that 40 health-care workers were infected with the novel coronavirus by patients at a single Wuhan hospital in January, underscoring the risks to those at the frontlines of the growing epidemic."

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/coronavirus-chin...

From the main article:

>...South Central Hospital. The deputy director went there to help in their ICU. He found that two-thirds of the medical staff in the ICU were already infected.

I was thinking maybe they should get low risk health workers (young fit) to deliberately get the virus under holiday conditions and then return to run the hospitals when immune.

yeah, in the early days, before mid of January, health care workers did not know what it was so a significant number got infected. And in the early days the local hospitals were overwhelmed with patients and the supplies were running short, some got infected. Now there are a lot of medical staff coming from other regions, and staff is pretty well protected. Hopefully we do not hear anymore medical staff infected.

I have been telling everyone to relax, these mass media panics about some virus happen every few years like clockwork. We are primed as a society to fear China right now so a panic like this is right on schedule.

Do you think it is a mass media panic within China? Because if you look at what is going on, it doesn’t look like the response to a yearly flu. It looks like a gravely serious event.

The big difference between this and flu is that there is no effective drug and vaccine. Some people react mildly to the virus, some people's immune system seems to compromised by the virus quickly. It also seems to have long incubation periods and high infection rate. In a city as dense as China, it would spread quick from person to person. So the only effective way to reduce infection is to quarantine people. Not allow them to gather around. Flu is actually affects a lot of people too. It just not a "massive event" because we dont try to contain it. It would take a similar measure to try to contain flu if there is no flu vaccine