[adinobro]

Are you aware that the Coronavirus is also known as "The Common Cold" and is actually fairly common?

If you take a swab of someone and it comes back as a virus that causes the common cold what response do you expect?

A person gets a cold virus ... what should happen next?

It wasn't until it was sequenced that they found it was a new variant.

[jgwil2]

Yes and no. Per Wikipedia: "The common cold is a viral infection of the upper respiratory tract. The most commonly implicated virus is a rhinovirus (30–80%), a type of picornavirus with 99 known serotypes. Other commonly implicated viruses include human coronavirus (≈ 15%), influenza viruses (10–15%), adenoviruses (5%), human respiratory syncytial virus, enteroviruses other than rhinoviruses, human parainfluenza viruses, and metapneumovirus.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cold#Viruses

[adinobro]

It is one of the 200+ viruses that make up the common cold. If you did a lab test and found a coronavirus would it automatically raise a concern?

[segfaultbuserr]

It can explain Wuhan's early ignorance, but it cannot explain the incompetence of the government after the case has been escalated since the end of December.

[adinobro]

So, you do a lab test and it comes back Coronavirus which is expected. They do nothing (its the "cold").

Someone else wants to check it (basically luck or maybe policy since SARs) and when they do they notice it is different - 7th of January then by the 14th, they have it sampled and they have detection kits.

Because of SARs Wuhan takes a few days to figure out what to do and then decide to quarantine the entire city. It is a rush job but they don't exactly have a lot of time.

From the real discovery (7th) to massive response time is 2 weeks. In the past it has often been over a month before anything effective is done. What would you do differently?

[hobofan]

I'm pretty sure they already knew that it was a new variant when they saw that it was a coronavirus causing pneumonia. You don't just blindly start to sequence random swabs if you don't already have a very certain hunch about what you'll see.