Taiwan didn’t believe China that COVID-19 couldn’t be transmitted by human touch and blocked all flights from Hubei province at the end of 2019.  If China had done the same the spread of the virus would have been dramatically reduced.
UPDATE from thetimes.co.uk: Chinese scientists destroyed proof of virus in December
Chinese laboratories identified a mystery virus as a highly infectious new pathogen by late December last year, but they were ordered to stop tests, destroy samples and suppress the news, a Chinese media outlet has revealed.
A regional health official in Wuhan, centre of the outbreak, demanded the destruction of the lab samples that established the cause of unexplained viral pneumonia on January 1. China did not acknowledge there was human-to-human transmission until more than three weeks later.
The detailed revelations by Caixin Global, a respected independent publication, provide the clearest evidence yet of the scale of the cover-up in the crucial early weeks when the opportunity was lost to control the outbreak. Click to read full article.

As you know – events are moving fast, which has prompted us to raise one financial story from the story of the year – to the story of the last 12 years and now the most important story in our lifetime.

The answer’s yes but that has nothing to do with whether the measures will be effective or that billions won’t be wasted.

The markets are far more complicated than the headlines suggest – MoneyTalks predicted the timing of the dramatic change in direction and the contagion for one reason – we isolated the key variable – and no one’s talking about it.

Lots of questions remain about novel corona virus despite wall to wall media coverage but the only question about the economic and financial fall-out is will it go from bad to worse.