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[delphonso]

I think it's more about proximity than anything. China modernized quickly, but kept many of its traditions. This includes the consumption of a wide range of meat, and the use of animal parts and products in medicine. Switching from catching bats and occasionally cooking them up to providing cities with bat meat on demand (an exaggeration of the availability, but you get my point) is probably the real root to the viruses jumping species. Free range to distributed in concrete buildings with poor ventilation. There's also a good bit of smuggling that is done certain medicine types are illegal, but still in demand, which leads to live animals being smuggled to distribute or breed elsewhere - usually apartments or houses in cities.

This issue is complicated is basically my point. To stop the practice totally would be read as imperial western powers stomping on cultural traditions. To illegalize it locally might cause an uproar.

[da_nang]

Normally we'd use guns, but these seem to be of the Asuran variety. And we all know how those went down.

Sorry, but what does Asuran mean in this context?

Nanite replicators from Stargate: Atlantis.

[martinuzz]

I think the focus on transfer from wildlife and pointing fingers at China is somewhat hypocrite.
Yes, this virus most likely transferred to humans through someone eating raw bat or pangolin.

But aren't we just as much at risk from, say, a flu virus mutating to be just as deadly from our own western swine and bird industries? Their sheer numbers provide excellent mutation opportunities.
We already have regular outbreaks of swine-  and birdflu amongst animal populations in our countries.

Animal welfare is not going to increase after this pandemic (unless everone suddenly becomes a vegetarian).
There's already some talk here of abolishing free range and biological ranching and go full indoors controlled bio-industry, to minimize contact between our animal meatbags and local wildlife (including humans).

[mko]

But aren't we just as much at risk from, say, a flu virus mutating to be just as deadly from our own western swine and bird industries? Their sheer numbers provide excellent mutation opportunities.
We already have regular outbreaks of swine-  and birdflu amongst animal populations in our countries.

AFAIK animal-to-human disease contact is drastically reduced via mechanization of farming, better quality control and reduced number of species used for meat.

Industrial farms are bad for multiple reasons (especially if you care at all about cruel treatment of animals), but from what I know risk of producing new pandemic via producing new virus is not very high?

Though mad cow disease was direct result of insane insutrial farm practices (feeding plant-eating cows with ground bones).


And SARS-Cov-2 being nearly exact repeat of SARS-Cov-1 seems to suggest/indicate that something China-specific is going wrong.

[da_nang]

Historically, zoonotic outbreaks in Europe were caused by there being tons of people and tons of animals in a small space, lack of sanitation, and mismanagement of sick animals and products thereof.

Free-range animals aren't the problem. Hunting isn't the problem. The plague didn't start on the farm nor the hunter's lodge. Nor would it spread like crazy on the farm or on the hunting grounds.

Don't have large open animal markets. Prepare and sell food with sanitation in mind. Identify and restrict sick animals and tainted animal products. Reduce the incidence of sick animals by improving sanitation of their living habitats.

Optionally, stop giving them antibiotics all the time. The last thing we need is an antibiotic-resistant pandemic.

[wierd]

BUSHMEAT.


that is what is going wrong.

[ChairmanPoo]

Re: Chinese unreported deaths.

It will be interesting when all this is over to compare mortality rates in 2020 with 2019.

Because all things point to ALL COUNTRIES doing extremedly sloppy record keeping

I doubt China is an exception and I wouldnt be surprised they have a higher number of covid deaths that werent listed because they were never confirmed, or were listed as something else. I'd not be shocked to find the real number is 2-3x or more. Similar things have been seen elsewhere. Granted it's impossible to tell how many of these excess deaths are from covid and how many are from actually other things which dont get treated because of hospital saturation and because people avoid going to A&E due to covid fears (which is happening)

Really it's odd how the same problems and mistakes are happening over and over all the world over

[Bralbaard]

And SARS-Cov-2 being nearly exact repeat of SARS-Cov-1 seems to suggest/indicate that something China-specific is going wrong.

Don't forget that china has an absolutely huge population. If a virus is going to jump to a random patient zero, there is a much higher chance that that person happens to live in china, vs the USA.
Virus outbreaks happen in other countries as well. Remember the  mexican flu? It did not turn out to be dangerous, but it could have been.

Sure, close contact with animals increases the risk, but that situation is not unique to china either. It happens in many, many countries. It is just that with a large population like in china, the odds are that bad things happen there and not elsewhere. From what I understand though, china will be likely to crack down on the animal markets. Not sure how that will work out though, it will be difficult to change a cultural thing like that. As I said before, for a comparison: it is well-established that america's rampant gun ownership is problematic, but it is never going to change, no matter how many people die. However if any regime can force a change, it will be China.

[Reelya]

Also, 2 isn't such a large sample size, so detecting a trend there would be premature.

MERS happened too.

[Frumple]

How many people do to this in USA? How many do it in China?

Tens of thousands Wait, sorry, our licensed hunter population alone is over 10 million, so millions do it in the US yearly. It's bunches either way. Sporadic hunting is particularly common in rural areas -- just for my personal locality, I'd guess pretty easy better than half of it has eaten wild venison in the last year, ferex, nevermind other stuff -- and it's not super unknown to do stuff like feed fresh roadkill (deer or hog, usually) to prisoners and whatnot. Maybe wet markets increase likelihood, but they're damn sure not the only source of that kind of human/animal interaction, not by a long shot.

Incidentally, y'know, the so called spanish flu originated stateside

[TD1]

It's the unclean and close-quarters keeping of many animal species that's the issue, not their 'wild' status so much.

[Max™]

It's the unclean and close-quarters keeping of many animal species that's the issue, not their 'wild' status so much.

Yeah, cages stacked on cages with feces and food and other secretions mixing in a big dumb petri dish is the problem.

The known cases in the US is closing in on 170k as I type this.

We're still only testing obvious symptomatic patients for the most part, it's hard to find negative test results though they are of critical importance when it comes to estimating what sort of measures need to be taken, so it's a good thing the agencies responsible for tracking this information and providing it are... *touches ear* uh huh... uh huh... FUCKING WHAT... shit... ok, well, yeah, remember when that one website stopped providing negative testing numbers because it might make the administration look bad? Apparently that was THE website which is supposed to do this.

Ideally we'd know about ~170k cases and have done nearly 2 million tests, but it's completely possible we've inverted those numbers and only gotten 15~20k negative test results.

It did surpass 9/11 in death toll at some point yesterday... though I must point out that is just confirmed deaths due to COVID-19 so far.

Whenever we end up with a better idea of the excess mortality rate[n] we can realistically attribute to this, you could write a book on how to not handle a pandemic and call it "n Hidden 9/11's: How NOT to Handle a Pandemic" if it isn't something horrifying like 100 or more implying ~290k extra deaths which is unfortunately not a possibility we can readily dismiss.

It's actually even more surreal watching this trainwreck happen with the direct memory of how utterly bizarre that morning 19 years ago was, I didn't approve of anything dubya was doing really, but I never felt such a gaping void of anything resembling leadership as we do right now.

I mean, I knew we had fallen pretty goddamn far with all the republican bullshit prior to Trump, but I guess the constant low level crisis of his presidency in general made it easy to overlook just how calm everything really was and how lucky he has been the whole time that no real crisis popped up because he is so much less than we needed it's hard to be properly scared.

You can't overreact to a pandemic, btw, because overreaction looks like the handful of countries that jumped on this shit and locked it down, and the only way that is incorrect is if for some strange reason the virus had burned itself out weeks ago... but it's never the wrong choice.

We, here in the USA, are a case study on why you only ever regret underreacting to shit like this, don't be like us, for fuck's sake.

[McTraveller]

My state has a test positive to test conducted rate of about a quarter: 22k tests and 5500 positives.  We've only tested at least 0.2% of our state population though.

[Iduno]

How many people do to this in USA? How many do it in China?

Tens of thousands Wait, sorry, our licensed hunter population alone is over 10 million, so millions do it in the US yearly. It's bunches either way. Sporadic hunting is particularly common in rural areas -- just for my personal locality, I'd guess pretty easy better than half of it has eaten wild venison in the last year, ferex, nevermind other stuff -- and it's not super unknown to do stuff like feed fresh roadkill (deer or hog, usually) to prisoners and whatnot. Maybe wet markets increase likelihood, but they're damn sure not the only source of that kind of human/animal interaction, not by a long shot.

Incidentally, y'know, the so called spanish flu originated stateside

ALso, alligators, snakes, squirrels, and some birds don't require hunting licenses. People eat weird shit here, too.

[misko27]

But aren't we just as much at risk from, say, a flu virus mutating to be just as deadly from our own western swine and bird industries? Their sheer numbers provide excellent mutation opportunities.
We already have regular outbreaks of swine-  and birdflu amongst animal populations in our countries.

See the issue most commonly associated with pandemics via US farms is overuse of antibiotics which create antibiotic immune bacteria. Which is horrible, mind, and obviously bacteria!= viruses, but its decidedly a different issue than lack of sanitation.

Also, uh, to be blunt, there's a bit of a difference between American rednecks in their rural homes eating weird shit and getting sick vs Chinese equivalent of rednecks eating weird shit in an urban environment. One is gonna get himself sick, the other will infect a couple dozen others.

America is simply vastly less dense than China, or even Europe or India. Who knows how many diseases end up isolated in remote communities and never get a chance to spread?