Prognosis
China Is About to Find Out Whether Its Mass Quarantine Worked
“This is more and more like flu, which is like trying to stop the wind.”
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In the last two weeks, China locked down some 50 million people in more than a dozen cities to try and stop the new coronavirus that has sickened thousands in the province of Hubei.
It may take as long as 14 days for the flu-like symptoms of the virus, dubbed 2019-nCov, to appear. Soon, China will find out if the largest mass quarantine in history has worked, or if undiscovered cases have quietly dispersed and seeded a far wider epidemic.