My concern with this is that we have a whole string of countries that have borrowed money through China's belt and roads initiatives. Many of these countries do not have systems in place that can possibly either detect or deal with an outbreak. Pakistan, for example, whilst having no "official" cases, also only received its first testing kits yesterday. For these countries, it is more important to remain allies with China than to close borders and report cases, so we have Pakistan reopening flights when everyone else is cancelling theirs, and Cambodia's prime minister offering to visit Wuhan in a show of support and denial. The same goes to various extents for a whole swathe of similarly indebted countries like Myanmar and Thailand.
These countries have to weigh the fact that they cannot really do a great deal even if the virus reaches them against the potential loss of support from their most powerful ally. Advice from Pakistan's health advisory board is to wash your hands and trust to god. Which to be honest, is probably reasonably accurate advice for those countries (and maybe ours too).
The question is, will we actually know on an international level when and how bad infection in these countries gets? Pakistan (sorry for picking on Pakistan) has a terrible record of covering up epidemics. Apparently, following wiping out the worst form of Polio, it then accidentally reintroduced it to a child from a lab, which then spread into the general population, and then instead of coming clean, decided to implement secret inoculations (I wish this was tinfoil hat stuff, but its reported in mainstream papers like the Guardian and Telegraph).
So how long are we going to be worrying about people who have been to China, before we should be worrying about people coming from Pakistan and all these other countries that may have outbreaks without ever testing for them or reporting them? I read an article somewhere, can't remember where, which likened the situation to us fending off incoming ping pong balls. You can bat them back so long as they come in at a certain rate, but at some point, if it just becomes a hail storm, then you can't do anything about it.
As I see it, Pandora's box is well and truly open, and we are going to have a rough old year. Boris Johnson always wanted to play Churchill, let's hope he can pull off the role. I truly hope this challenge brings out the best of us and not the worst. I know lots of people who work in the NHS and I know how hard they work. If anyone can keep us safe, they can. I really hope this ends up being much closer to swine flu than SARS.
I am also a big fan of having history prove that extrapolation is far less reliable than interpolation and I really, really hope that it makes me look a right old wally this time around.