The worrying thing is at the people from the Princess cruise ship got released, after being confined to tight quarters on that boat.

And everyday for 2 weeks, the confirmed infected count went higher and higher. And then, they released the people into the general public. Now, these people are spread out all over the world.

The Western governments blew it on this one. They should’ve evacuated the passengers immediately, and quarantined each one of them, separately, for 2 weeks, to confirm that they weren’t infected.

But, they can still save the situation, by forcing these people released to be quarantined for another 2 weeks.

I was under the assumption that the passengers were quarantined in their private quarters onboard.

Yes, but recent evidence indicates that the cruise ships are not safe for quarantine. It’s like they were all in the same cesspool, just waiting to get infected.

In theory, cruise ships should be pretty well suited for such purposes; industry experience with outbreaks (mostly norovirus I believe), private restroom in every cabin, probably top-notch central filtration on the AC, no more than two people in most cabins ... I wonder how the virus managed to spread so widely in such a short time under such conditions.

staff not quaranteed. Food carried down corridors without any covering from the air. Only ht food was covered with aluminium foil.

Even worse than that: https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...

An excerpt:

Iwata said he saw people eating lunch with their medical gloves on, and handling their smartphones while wearing protective suits, “so it was completely chaotic."

My understanding is that the crew was still preparing the food. With the outbreak, it's inevitable that one of the kitchen staff would catch it, and then everything coming out of that kitchen is contaminated.

Missed pun opportunity at went viral?

The BBC isn't likely to make puns about something so serious.

But The Times does, sorta. Though this is a lot less serious in topic than the BBC article https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/coronavirus-james-bo...

This is nothing close to serious. It's a media hype train that people lap up.

More people died from the flu last week than this virus has killed in months.

>Remember when every media outlet on the planet said that Hillary Clinton would win the election in a landslide? The same outlets also said brexit would never happen. How did that turn out?

You aren't doing your case any favours, both of those examples are very clear forward looking statements. Both of them had reasonable basis in fact to believe both those things. This is not the same thing as lying.

The Hillary thing is a prime example of how scarily easy it is for large numbers of people to dismiss broad categories of information when a perfectly reasonable wrong (e.g. a wrong statistical forecast) happens to affirmatively coincide with negative feelings in their personal social politics or emotional preconceptions. You see the same thing with doctors especially.