Limited expertise may hurt India's ability to contain coronavirus outbreak

Containing pandemics requires a multi-pronged approach: from mathematical analysis to the ability to rapidly develop drugs and vaccines.

There are too many unknowns in the recent Wuhan corona virus outbreak that now threatens to become a pandemic. Scientists don’t fully know where the virus came from. They don’t know how virulent it is. Public health officials don’t know how many people have been infected. They don’t know whether the virus can be shed to the environment before the symptoms show up.

All these factors are important to how the world manages to control or limit a pandemic. Yet there is one aspect of the outbreak that is now known clearly: Chinese officials underestimated the severity of the outbreak, even