nd politics when an outbreak threatens to impact on global economies and reputations. The unprecedented measures implemented in China are a bold attempt to control the outbreak – we need to understand their effectiveness to balance costs and benefits for similar events in the future.

Introduction
On 29 December 2019 clinicians in a hospital in Wuhan City, China noticed a clustering of cases of unusual pneumonia (with the first case identified at that time on 12 December) with an apparent link to a market that sells live fish, poultry and animals to the public. This event