Respirators and surgical masks for infection control have been strongly suggested and even temporarily made mandatory in some places by the Chinese government, but no U.S. authority has done the same. This hasn’t stopped people from buying up N95 masks from all over the United States.

This New York Times article attempts to cut through the headlines and use a simple concept called the “epidemic triangle.” Employed by epidemiologists since the discipline’s earliest days, it is indispensable in predicting whether localized outbreaks will transform into full-blown epidemics.

A man is in isolation at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington after returning home to Washington state after a trip to Wuhan China on Jan. 15, 2020. This is the first case in the U.S. of an infection with a new coronavirus, named 2019-nCoV, which causes respiratory symptoms like pneumonia. Cases have also… Read more »