It can happen here: How a new epidemic might come to America

Left, George Young as Dr. Victor Cannerts in a poster for Containment; right, Dr. Li Wenliang. (Images: The CW via IMDb; The New York Times, original source not given.)

Republished, with revisions, from an original post here.

Imagine that a recent immigrant—illegal, it later turns out—staggers into a hospital in your city with what seems like a bad cold and consults with a doctor before vanishing, and the doctor, after showing symptoms almost immediately, dies soon after, of what proves to be a highly lethal and hitherto unknown virus. It’s hard to say how things would go from this point, but your city could find itself facing what Atlanta faces in a single-season TV drama from a few years back—the quarantine of the hospital and an entire section of the city.