From NPR.
This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
It all started at a live fish and meat market in Wuhan, a city in central China.
No one knows exactly how or when, but one day late last year, a coronavirus leaped from an animal into a human.
Before long, people all around Wuhan started getting sick.
We know what happened next.
To curb the spread of this coronavirus, China announced a draconian lockdown of more than 11 million people in Wuhan.
No one in, no one out.
What we're seeing and hearing on the Internet is police in hazmat suits going door to door, taking people away who either have a fever or are rumored to have been in contact with someone who did.
Containment is the goal here, and using whatever means is necessary.
By the time China had set up these containment measures, the virus had slipped outside of Wuhan.
It began spreading to other places across the globe from South Korea.
Two patients may have contracted the disease from someone who was infected here in the nation.
Or Hong Yoo is standing by on the line to Italy.
Northern Italy emerged as an early hotspot for that nation.
Near the end of February, the italian government began imposing travel restrictions on residents of the Lombardi region.
But it was too late.
On March 8, with the virus spreading wildly, the government locked down some 16 million people in Lombardy and 14 neighboring provinces.
In theory, it means that people are not supposed to leave those areas.