Lien Phung

Within a week of the news about the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China, many people panicked and bought all the facemasks off the shelf. Over one of our lunch breaks, my colleague in the immunology department told me she recently sent a box of masks to her mother in New York, because the stores there ran out of masks. My colleague and I agreed that the panicked reaction to the virus in America is laughable. Those affected here would be properly quarantined, and it would take several weeks at least for the virus to fully spread. The countries adjacent to China had many more worries than we did, we agreed.