in the world's most populous country

look like during this new coronavirus outbreak.

Millions of people in China

have been ordered to stay indoors

or banned from traveling

in an attempt to stop the disease from spreading.

But from the city of Wuhan,

where the first patient came from,

coronavirus infections have spread

to several continents.

So, why is it so hard to contain these outbreaks?

And, are we ready for the next one?

This strain of the coronavirus

is believed to have spread

from animals to humans,

and then from humans to humans

by droplets from sneezing or coughing.

The World Health Organization says

that, so far, it has a low mortality rate.

The flu, for example, kills thousands of people every year.

But this coronavirus strain is new,

and it is infectious, which is why

it's being taken so seriously.

As of February 2020, about 60 million people,

more than the entire population of Spain,

are being quarantined in their homes in China.

It's a massive feat. But some fear

that isolating that many people together could backfire.

First of all, you can't wall off a germ.

Simply impossible.

Lawrence Gostin is a professor

of Global Health Law at Georgetown University

and a director at the World Health Organization's Center

on Global Health Law.

Can you imagine if you were forced

to be congregated in with 50 million people

in a hot zone of contagion, how you would feel?

You'd feel you're a guinea pig.

You would feel panicky.

You would worry about getting food,

water, essential medicines,

that you couldn't get to a hospital,

and you were walled off from the world.

Professor Gostin worries

about a breakdown in public trust.

If the public doesn't trust the solutions

being offered by officials,

then they aren't solutions at all.

For example, in the West African Ebola outbreak,

many people stopped reporting

when they were getting sick.

They didn't trust the foreign health workers

who were cordoning patients off from the rest of society,

especially since many were dying in quarantine.

And so the outbreak continued to spread.

Many people were infected and more died.

But even if there is full cooperation

between officials and the population at risk,

it's hard to contain an outbreak like the coronavirus.

We're less safe because we're globally interconnected

in a way that we've never ever been before.

In 1950, 750 million people

lived in urban areas globally.

Today, that number is more than 4 billion.

People are living closer together,

many in overcrowded areas, making it easier

for disease to spread from human to human.

And our modern transport infrastructure

means a virus that would have been geographically

contained in the past can now get from one side

of the globe to another in just a few hours.

In 2003, another coronavirus epidemic called SARS

spread from China.

There's actually four times greater

international travel by Chinese citizens

now than there was during SARS.

But transport technology

is generally a good thing,

and people will keep moving to urban areas.

What's more, viruses are always mutating into new strains.

So, in reality we can't avoid outbreaks.

We just need to get better at dealing with them.

We tend to lurch from complacency

to panic and overreaction.

And so, when we're in a major outbreak,

like we are now with the coronavirus,

we tend to react and overreact

and try to just catch up and respond.

But then, as soon as things calm down,

we withdraw funding, we withdraw planning,

we withdraw preparedness.

So, isn't it a much, much better way

to prepare for an epidemic

and to prevent it and detect it early?

So, if the solution

is to be proactive rather than reactive,

what can we do?

Until a vaccine is discovered

for this strain of the coronavirus,

you can protect yourself and others

by covering your mouth

when coughing or sneezing,

washing your hands frequently,

and, if you develop symptoms,

avoiding contact with others

until you're cleared by a doctor.

That's what you can do.

But governments need to do more,

and they need to do it together.

There's no real way to force a government

to work with global health organizations

if it doesn't want to.

For example, during the SARS epidemic,

Chinese officials hid the extent of the outbreak

from both the Chinese public and the world.

That led to many more people being infected.

This time around, lessons seem to have been learned.

China informed the World Health Organization

and its own citizens of this new coronavirus

relatively quickly.

It also sequenced the virus's genome

and shared that information

with scientists around the world,

who have begun working on trying to find a vaccine.

- We used to not have effective vaccines.

We didn't have effective antiviral medications.

Now, we can rapidly develop those.

So, yes, we are very much less safe,

but we have the technical capacity to be safer.

But the problem with any defense,

is that it's only as strong as its weakest link.

And we live in a world where access to healthcare

and healthy environments is not equal.

If you asked any thoughtful epidemiologist,

"What is the single greatest predictor

of a human being's health?"

He would say, "The postal code."

Where you live matters. And it's not just

the differences in health systems

and public health infrastructure

between high-income and low- and middle-income countries.

There are also vast inequities within countries

for those who are living in well-heeled neighborhoods

and those that are living in squalor.

This is simply immoral, unjust.

That's a problem,

even in the world's richest country

where many people avoid going to the doctor

because of how expensive American healthcare can be.

That's tragic enough by itself.

But in an epidemic, it might be disastrous.

If we're going to be proactive in our fight

against these outbreaks,

improving healthcare quality for everyone

might be the best strategy we've got.

Health equality matters,

and it matters a lot - not just for the individual,

not just for the community, not only for the country,

but for the globe.