It took the new Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty two weeks to make an appearance on the Today programme to discuss the UK’s response to the virus.

Over the past thirty years we have experienced a succession of new such threats to public health including Bovine Spongeiform Encephalitis (Mad Cow Disease), Avian flu, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Swine flu, Ebola and now Corona. With each of these episodes lessons have been learned that would hopefully have been carried forward for the next time.

One important such lesson has been that in the age of the internet and of social media tight central control of information by central agencies is all but impossible. Any effective modern response must view the public as equal partners in containing and controlling potentially serious outbreaks, and understand that good communications are of the essence. Such full public engagement is vital if the outbreak goes beyond containment to involve millions of people, when the community itself must bear the brunt of both preventive efforts and care of the sick. Deploying experts will not help ordinary people nurse themselves and their families through such a situation.

Although the rapid and effective response to outbreaks of epidemic disease depends on reliable data, it seems that in this as in previous Chinese episodes, the nature of the political regime has militated against a proper understanding. With the recent involvement of the World Health Organisation and a sharp revision upwards of both the numbers of cases and deaths, we may finally be comprehending the true extent of the challenge to both world health and the global economy. Simultaneously it has become apparent that in the age of social media, even regimes as totalitarian as China cannot keep the lid on public conversation. Yet if governments seek to keep the population in the dark, rumour and panic may be the principal beneficiaries.