“What everyone is worried about is 1918 – Spanish flu. Fifty million deaths in a flu season. That was over 100,000 deaths a day.” Prof Mark Walker, the director of the Australian Infectious Disease Research Centre at the University of Queensland, says Australia has had to respond to the novel coronavirus outbreak by imagining the worst that might happen. “That’s the perspective. Right at the start of an outbreak, you can’t predict which way it’s going to go, and that’s why there has been such a strong response.” Coronavirus: the epidemic that gripped the world Read more Barely a month after the first recorded death from what is now known as Covid-19, about 1,500 people have died, almost all in the Chinese city of Wuhan and surrounding Hubei province. Flight routes have been shut down, travel bans issued, thousands of people evacuated and quarantined. As the World Health Organization’s […]