[icambron]

> There has to be a sweet spot between telling everyone immediately, inciting a panic

I disagree. Perfect transparency is always the right way to go with epidemic diseases. That information will go through all kinds of natural filters: scientific journalists who can dispense useful advice, foreign governments that can refer to quarantine policies, and every day people who can make tradeoffs about the risks they're willing to face. Far worse is having a bunch of seemingly arbitrary restrictions imposed because of--in the minds of citizenry--some vague but clearly terrifying disease is killing people, but about which the populace has no useful information.

Cures don't really come out quickly, or even vaccines. The main way you stop a disease by preventing its spread, not curing it. So what ideally comes out quickly is guidelines and simple preventative measures. Watch for these signs and report them. Don't spend time around people coughing. Wear a mask. Etc. And people have to know that stuff if they're going to be part of the solution, not to mention the everyday medical professionals at your local hospital (with no connection to the WHO) who need to know who to isolate and what preventative measures to take. And of course they need to know how bad it is in order to prioritize it relative to other concerns. Concealing from people what's happening makes all of that harder.

We saw with SARS in the West that epidemics can be overblown, but there wasn't widespread panic and the widespread availability of information allowed people to choose how much to guard against it. I'd go so far as to say it's your right to overreact to accurate information. And in the end, it wasn't some magic cure that stopped SARS; it's was fast response and quarantine.

Anything other than complete transparency about public health issues is immoral.