A colleague asked this week why there’s so much panic around the new coronavirus. It’s not as deadly as the pneumonia-like virus called as SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), which broke out in China almost two decades ago.

Well, a few reasons: it’s spreading fast through the world’s most populous country — its case count surpassed that of SARS in under a month. There’s little information about it, and in the age of Twitter, WeChat and Facebook, the world is much more plugged in to what’s going on...

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