This situation with the Diamond Princess has been a comedy (tradegy that is) of errors. Of course, hindsight is always 20-20, but this has been a disaster. They kept people on board, essentially making sure the virus spread to hundreds of people.

Then, when the outcry got to be too much, they just let everybody off, basically dispersing all that pent up virus around one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world. People got off the boat and went straight on to public transportation and disappeared into the sea of Tokyo.

We know that people can be contagious before symptoms appear, and we know that the swab diagnosis produces false negatives. There's a near certainty that more than just a few contagious people were sent on their merry way.

And these contagious people were made contagious by being kept on the boat! It's just bizarre.

My big sociological question is, at what point are we as a global community going to decide to just say fuck it, it's no big deal, and carry on. I mean, at some point, a bigger threat will emerge, be that the entire west coast of the US being on fire or an approaching asteroid, and we'll realize that this virus, with it's likely less than 1% fatality rate, is just not that big of a deal.

At some point, the economic and social costs are going to outweigh the health risks. What is that point? That's the question that intrigues me.