Pneumonic Plague Is Diagnosed in China
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/13/world/asia/plague-china-pneumonic.html
This New York Times article discusses how two people in Beijing were diagnosed with the plague where everyone in Beijing, especially the government, became worried about this disease spreading. It mentioned in the article that these two people were from Mongolia, northern China. They were brought to the hospital and diagnosed with the pneumonic plague in Beijing. The two patients were isolated from everyone else and were monitored. Everyone in China grew worried as this was similar to the Black Death which killed millions of people in Europe and spread throughout Asia and Africa. The government chose to not disclose the information and in the article it said “The plague is not the most terrifying part,” one user wrote on Weibo. “What’s even scarier is the information not being made public.” The Chinese government took a long time to tell the public but the news spread anyways. These two people were isolated from everyone, because the government was worried that the pneumonic plague would spread.
This article has to do with disease spreading and information spreading that we learned in class. First, in terms of disease spreading, disease spreads at random where there are many different waves of people that come into contact with the disease. We could solve for R0 to see if this disease, the plague, would die out, or calculate the expected number of transmissions by one node. If R0>1, then it is possible that the disease will persist forever. If R0 is < or = to 1 then the disease dies out after a finite number of waves. In this case the government was worried that if two people had the plague then once infected, a node can transmit to other neighbors independently as learned in class.
Furthermore, the article has to do with information spreading, specifically information-based benefits. Since the government did not disclose the information that two people had the plague, then people could not protect themselves or follow the crowd. The public could not benefit from direct benefits or information-based benefits. It would have been helpful to know that two people were contaminated, as people could have taken precaution and reduced the likeliness of catching the disease.