So many events are now being cancelled, here and overseas... and I feel really bad for those who have their event cancelled at the last minute, particularly if they have already spent a lot of money to get to it, or can't get refunds if they aren't yet there.
It's such a difficult decision, closing down social events, businesses, recreational places and schools/universities for up to several weeks, as no one wants to be the politician or CEO who was in charge during a virus cluster, so are taking early preventative measures... but it's not going to kill of the virus, as I think it's only just going to delay the inevitable.
This is a flu-like virus, so it isn't going to ever go away, unless you have every human on the planet avoid contact with every other human for about 3-4 weeks. It will be like measles - even if there is a vaccine developed (which is at least 6 months away), not everyone will get the vaccine, so the virus will continue to exist... until most people catch it or get vaccinated.
Basically what I'm saying, is that I think closing down everything now while the infection numbers are quite low, might look to be the right thing to do if this was a short-lived, low contamination virus like SARS, but COVID-19 is a lot more contagious, and it sounds like it is very contagious for the 2-3 days before you have any symptoms or a fever (for those temperature scanning devices). As such, I think the people making the decision to close down everything now, are going to have a much tougher decision in a few weeks time to not be the first to re-open when the virus is still popping up in new cities and countries around the world. This is because it's spread now will be a lot slower, but it won't kill it off globally, so infection rates will go back up when people make the difficult decision to re-open things, just to keep the country going.
I mean, how long can schools, businesses, themeparks, sporting events, etc, stay closed for? And how long can countries have travel bans in place for? This virus isn't going to disappear off the planet in the next 2 weeks... or even 2 months... because it is still only in a very small number of places (even in Australia it hasn't hit plague proportions yet), so how are they going to decide when to re-open things if the virus still exists? Even if it suddenly drops down to being just a few cases in one country and everything is opened back up again, we will be back at this point two months later, because that's what it was like just two months ago when the first cases appeared outside of Wuhan. All this is just after 2-3 months of virus spreading... how is it going to disappear in just a few weeks for these events, schools and businesses to say it is "safe to re-open"... but how many can survive more than a few weeks being closed? (and more importantly, how many countries will see total collapse of their society if most of their economy is shut down for a month or two... or more - considering our economy is said to be one of the best of the developed world despite no budget surplus or trade surplus for most of the last 20 years, how are countries with worse credit ratings going to afford this)
Maybe slowing down it's spread could even be a bad thing for society and the economy, as it won't stop spreading until most people have caught it (to have the anti-bodies in their system or they died from it), or a vaccine is created (which will also take several months to develop and administer)... all of which I can't see happening until at least this time next year. Can we as a society survive with most things being closed for several months, knowing that if they re-open while the virus still exists somewhere in the world, no matter how much it disappears within our country, the contamination rates will just go back up again.
And what if it behaves like the flu virus and mutates from time to time, requiring constant vaccines every year and never being eradicated. We would then just have to live as a society with new flu-like viruses that get spread around like the flu, but have a higher mortality rate (quite a few people die of the flu each year too, but the percentage isn't as high as the corona virus).