China coronavirus spread is accelerating, Xi Jinping warns.

Not a chance, we don't know enough to custom design any virus, we can assemble them from the raw instructions but we don't know what the instructions mean, we don't know their effect.

And why would North Korea attack China which is clearly the epicentre of this epidemic?

We don't need conspiracy theories to explain something that happens all the time in the natural world, viruses mutate and have crossed from one species to another throughout all of history.

You can spot a conspiracy theory the minute you need to start creating complex explanations for something that already has a simple explanation.

Human's synthesizing viral genomes by design is sci-fi, yes we can construct them from scratch when we already know the viral genome sequence but we can't design them.

It's official I just listened to Duterte announce the school closures until April 12.

Metro Manila in official quarantine, full lockdown.

Barangay quarantine where 2 or more cases are identified.

Government agencies to reduce to a skeleton workforce.

City lockdown if 2 infections in 2 barangays in same municipality.

Metro Manila closed to land, air and sea travel from March 15th until April 14th with daily review, I bet it will be longer than that so that is the end of my trip next month, pretty sure my daughter's graduation won't happen when it is supposed to happen either as it is a public gathering and those have been banned too.

For once I have to hand it to the strong man, it might be a little late in the day but with the current case count in the Philippines he's taking the correct action they are being proactive about it compared to us who are still reacting to it.

Yeah he's letting Filipinos come home but he's not letting foreigners enter if they are coming in from any country where there is community spreading of the disease which by then will basically be all of them. (edit: by April I mean)

I listened to Duterte's broadcast on this earlier.

According to the broadcast I saw Duterte said no one is getting in or out of Metro Manila after the 15th of March, so they have 3 days to get home at this point, that's what I took from the announcement.

If you think about it, if only Filipinos are allowed to fly there won't be enough passengers for the airlines to justify the flights, many Filipinos return on subsidised maritime tickets I don't know if the shipping companies get these cheap or not but I am guessing the airlines don't make a lot from these passengers.

I'm going to leave it a day or two and see if KLM/AirFrance contact me again but I can't imagine that they will let me fly as a foreigner because I would likely be deported on arrival, imprisoned/quarantined or not allowed to board on the Taiwan to Philippine leg.

My travel insurance however does actually cover me as I have LV's Premier annual cover on auto renewal (renews next week) and while LV have just withdrawn the offer of travel insurance to new customers they are honouring the contracts from their existing customers who auto renew.

Sad to say but Filipinos are panic buying like mad.

My family have just spent 8 hours trying to get their weekly groceries from a Puregold supermarket quite close to our house.

Yes Malcolm, it is a terrible dichotomy do we keep them all in one place all day or do we let the little bu**ers run around all over the place and infect everyone

My kids are in the Metro Manila lockdown already, today (Friday) was a bad day because the whole country panicked and went to the markets, supermarkets and hypermarkets at 9am when they opened, this was because Duterte announced the lock-down on Thursday night and while he tried to be clear on continuation of commerce and the supply of basics like food the message did not get across properly and they panicked.

So Janna, James and Granny, who is 79, spent 8 hours in the queue to (A) get into the supermarket (B) pick their supplies and (C) pay for it and (D) find some way to get home, a great way to put lots of people in contact with some who might already be infected, 8 hours just to get your shopping for the week and we were not even panic buying, today was grocery day.

I had made a point to James that we all need to be responsible and after I explained that he realised that cooperation would be far better than panic and that just buying what we need was more sensible than trying to buy too much and more of things than we really needed right now.

But sadly the Phils did not live up to that ideal, I hope my son realises that what I was saying is the right way, the cooperative way where everyone gets a fair chance, I mean for the future for the next time this happens but he might forget, I try to talk to James and Janna as much as I can about more grown up views of these kinds of problems in life and they do understand even though they are still so young, but reality on the streets will still cause panic.

And the real problem is that we have no reserves, because we live day to day between the UK and the Philippines and I have little in the way of reserves in spite of being very well paid.

Without financial reserves you can't build up supplies in advance which is what we should all be doing gradually now, not panicking and panic buying but gradually laying down more stocks of what we need to survive.

If we have greater stocks that means that we can reduce the frequency of visits to markets, i.e . reduce the number of social interactions, we all need to do that, edit: but slowly.