Wuhan Coronavirus: A techie's random thoughts

The outbreak has arrived. It's been a week of worldwide panic as the 2019-nCoV, otherwise known as the Wuhan Coronavirus, started infectng the city-dwellers of Wuhan in the province of Hubei, China. Cases of infection soon hit Singapore and the rest of the world as Wuhan went into lockdown mode.

Contagion.

And this is of interest to me, why?

Well, firstly, here's the personal part. A few months ago, my Chinese national wife returned to her hometown of Zunyi in the province of Guizhou to celebrate the Lunar New Year with her family. Shortly after the outbreak in Wuhan began, there were three reported cases of infection in Guizhou. And as such, it's my matrimonial duty to stay on top of things. Underneath it all is the nagging fear that if things go really south, I could become a bereft husband instead of merely an anxious one.

Yes, this is how I manage anxiety - by blogging. Eat me.

Secondly, as a Singaporean, I have a vested interest in not having the Wuhan Coronavirus take root here. Although it may be a little late for that. As of today, the count of infected cases in Singapore has risen to ten, though thankfully there have been no deaths so far. More on that later...

And lastly, response to this outbreak has produced some truly neat stuff. I'd like to point to this real-time updated website by thebaselab.co which is a great example of a mobile-friendly API-data driven site.

Screenshot.

A cursory look at their source tells me it was quickly hammered out with Twitter Bootstrap and Google APIs. Impressive work. I might have slipped them a few bucks as a token of appreciation for their trouble, and if you found the information useful, you might want to do the same.

How Singaporeans have handled the situation so far

I've seen people step up in recent weeks.

Some have expressed concern for their fellow citizens and distributed supplies such as hand sanitizer and personal thermometers.

Singaporeans stepping up.

An ex-classmate of mine went the extra mile to source for surgical masks so that retailers would be limited in their ability to profiteer off this emergency. At this point, I'm not even sure the masks will be enough to prevent the spread, but come on, that effort has got to be worth something.

Some have done their part to combat the flood of fake news, conspiracy theories and stirred hysteria online, analyzing this outbreak in relation to previous ones such as SARS and MERS. The numbers, so far, have been somewhat reassuring.

Other Singaporeans... not so much.

There's been a petition going round to refuse entry to all Chinese nationals and travelers from China. The latter I could understand (even though that would not be in my personal interests, because obviously if my wife returned, she would be returning from China), but all Chinese nationals? Not all people with a Chinese passport have been to China in the past year. Some stay abroad for, y'know, work and shit. What, all Chinese nationals are suspect by virtue of simply being Chinese nationals? You know this looks suspiciously xenophobic, right? We're all understandably fearful for our families and all, but let's not get stupid.

This is what the SQL statement would look like. Imagine if tblArrivals was a relational table of all incoming people to our airport.

SELECT * FROM tblArrivals WHERE Nationality = 'PRC' and CountryOfOrigin = 'CH'

Number of records returned from that query? Definitely more than 1.4 billion. Because we would be including non-China citizens who just happened to be flying in from China.

Also, petitions don't work in Singapore. Period. A million of us could sign a petition and you would still have a better chance of winning the lottery twice in a row, than of pressuring the Singapore Government to do what we want. The Singapore Government will do what it deems fit, when it deems fit, which is pretty much their job in the first place. And honestly, if we knew better, we would be in governance.

Simply stopping incoming flights from Wuhan wouldn't accomplish anything. There are no incoming flights from Wuhan. As mentioned earlier, the city, indeed most of Hubei, is in lockdown.

What the Singapore Government has done, is stop entry or transit for new visitors who have traveled to Hubei in the last 14 days, as well as holders of Chinese passports issued in Hubei. This is a far more measured and reasonable approach.

This SQL query would look like this. In addition to the tblArrivals table, let's have a tblTravelHistory table.

SELECT * FROM tblArrivals WHERE PassportPlaceOfIssue = 'Hubei' AND ArrivalId IN
(
    SELECT TravellerId FROM tblTravelHistory WHERE Area = 'Hubei' AND Country = 'PRC' AND DateDeparted BETWEEN DATEADD(d, -14, GETDATE()) AND GETDATE()
)

That's a far smaller number than an absolute blanket ban on all Chinese nationals. Because if you really only want to prevent possible carriers from entering Singapore, remember that it's not actually their nationality that matters, but where they've been recently. A British visitor could be transiting from Malaysia, for example, having flown in from Hubei. A Chinese national could have been working in Malaysia for the past year and is now attempting to visit his cousin in Singapore. Who's the bigger risk?

Sorry, I'm rambling...

Did I mention that I'm anxious? God yes, I really fucking am.

The wife assures me that she's feeling fine. The streets are quiet and most of the city are staying indoors. The supermarkets are still open, though there's not much variety at the moment. I'm not a superstitious man by nature, but fingers crossed!

To your health,
T___T