Does quarantining do more harm than good?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 30 January 2020
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How will China's efforts to contain the corona virus affect the country's economy? Ed Butler asks our economics correspondent Andrew Walker, as well as a sceptical Lawrence Gostin, professor of health law at Georgetown University, who says the belated attempts to stop the spread of the epidemic are simply shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.
Moreover, how does quarantining affect those caught up in the net? Ed speaks to Ben Voyer, professor of psychological and behavioural science at the London School of Economics. He also hears the personal story of a survivor of the West African Ebola outbreak. Plus the BBC's China social media editor Kerry Allen explains how the Chinese authorities are doing their best to be transparent about the spread of the disease, while avoiding panic.
(Picture: A health worker checks the temperature of a man entering the subway in Beijing; Credit: Betsy Joles/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello there, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:05.7 | Today, the public health experiment that is shutting down an entire Chinese province. |
| 0:11.9 | You have a really unprecedented mass quarantine of the population of at least 50 million people, |
| 0:19.8 | which is it's never happened in the history of the world. |
| 0:22.9 | Does this kind of quarantine work? What are the economic consequences of the corona outbreak? |
| 0:28.5 | There are forecasters in China who have already suggested that economic growth for the first |
| 0:34.8 | quarter of the year is likely to be 5%. and that would be a very marked slowdown. |
| 0:39.8 | The price of panic? |
| 0:41.4 | That's Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:49.1 | That's the sound of the trapped. |
| 0:53.8 | Those are the cries, mostly of encouragement, some of desperation, |
| 0:58.7 | coming from high-rise apartments in Wuhan this week. |
| 1:02.1 | Millions of citizens in the Chinese city, the apex of the coronavirus outbreak, |
| 1:07.3 | are being told to stay home and to wait and avoid contact. |
| 1:15.4 | Stay strong, they cry. But it seems a big ask, as other videos from the city are showing |
| 1:21.1 | people collapsing in the streets. More than a hundred have now died from the disease. |
| 1:26.7 | Several thousand are known to have caught the virus. |
| 1:29.5 | And it's spreading to the rest of China and beyond. |
| 1:32.4 | People have been told that spring festival has been extended by a week, the holiday period of time. |
| 1:37.6 | So people have been advised, do stay in your homes. |
| 1:40.2 | If you absolutely have to go anywhere, don't go out without a mask. |
| 1:44.5 | People have been instructed to wash their hands frequently and just to as much as possible |
... |
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