Monmouth local living in Shanghai describes the coronavirus panic

"I’m in Shanghai. It has been a ghost town for a while but it’s picking back up a little more now. You can’t go anywhere without a mask. Most buildings are in quarantine. My building has all common areas blocked off (gym, movie room, ping pong table, and pool table) so everyone stays in their own apartment. Temperature checks are done for any nonresident in order to be cleared to enter. And that’s happening almost anywhere you go. Posts (are) going around about how to wash your hands like you would see in a preschool but for adults since hygiene isn’t the top priority here.To get more news about new coronavirus in china, you can visit shine news official website.
Hannah Taylor is an American woman from Monmouth, Illinois teaching in Shanghai, China. On February 13, she sat down for a Skype conversation with producer Brody Wooddell about what it's like to be an American in China during the coronavirus panic. A panic that seems almost incomprehensible to most Americans so far away from the outbreak.
When China reported a drop in the number of new cases of the deadly coronavirus earlier this week, hopes were raised that the outbreak might be slowing down.
But on Thursday, health authorities in Hubei, the province at the center of the epidemic, announced there had been nearly 15,000 new cases overnight -- almost 10 times the number of cases announced the previous day.
The government was quick to point out the outbreak didn't suddenly get much worse; the authorities had simply changed the way they reported cases in order to allow more people to access treatment faster.
"Our forecast was 1,500 new cases, and I opened my computer and it's 15,000 new cases. I think my hair stood up on my head," said David Fisman, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Toronto, who has spent a lot of time modeling the current coronavirus epidemic.
The shift in how new cases are diagnosed has compounded questions about whether the world can rely on the numbers coming out of China, amid criticism over the government's handling of the outbreak.
The total number of cases reported by China now includes "clinically diagnosed cases." These are patients who demonstrate all the symptoms of Covid-19 but have either not been able to get a test or are believed to have falsely tested negative.
Fisman said this was a positive move by the Chinese health authorities.
"They should be applauded for that because they're casting the net wider to try to do a better job of controlling spread from people who may not have a firm diagnosis yet," he said.
If the sudden huge spike in the numbers is unnerving to some, it doesn't actually mean an increase in the number of people who've fallen ill. In fact, Fisman said it would be "phenomenally irresponsible" to say the epidemic got worse.
"The case definitions change, that's a good public health practice, they don't want to miss cases," he said.
Delays in testing are not confined to China. In the US, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) currently requires that all potential samples are shipped to its central laboratories for full testing.
Speaking at a US Senate hearing on Wednesday -- before China's announcement -- Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, urged a similar change in procedure in the US to rein in any potential outbreak. He said that testing was not been done aggressively enough and should be expanded to cover more symptoms.
"I think that we should be leaning in very aggressively to broaden diagnostic screening right now, particularly in communities where there was a lot of immigration, where these outbreaks could emerge, to identify them early enough that they'll be small enough that we can intervene to prevent more epidemic spread in this country," he said.
Should we be more skeptical about what China is saying