Coronavirus: Did the World Dodge a Bullet?
Coronavirus is certainly looking very bad. Yet, a recent technology podcast, “Windows Weekly”, describes how it could be so much worse right now.
Every year, in early January, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) convenes in Las Vegas. I’ve attended many times in the past because I am a technology geek. It is huge. It is big. It is loud. It is also really, really crowded. People gather from all over the world, particularly from….. China.
For a week, people jostle in close contact, travel on packed buses, gather in crowded meeting spaces and then depart in full airplanes to return to their host countries. It appears CES missed the new Coronavirus outbreak by about a week or two. Think about it. Packing everyone in close contact for a week and then dispersing them across the planet, carrying disease everywhere. The difference of a week or two is the cushion between a massive simultaneous worldwide outbreak and the situation today. Yes, within the next few months, we may discover it mattered very little. At the moment, however, it appears much of the world dodged a huge bullet.
There was a spy novel that I read about 20 years ago. The villains planned a spray with a virulent and resistant bug (virus) in the spray cooling people at the Olympics. The latency would be enough time that everyone would have returned to the home countries. Reality and fiction match.