In 1999 I listened in on a panel of virologists on the BBC World Service.
Their unanimous conclusion was that this century would be the century of the virus and that is how it is playing out, both animal to animal and animal to human.
Industrialised farming and our ability to travel the world in ever shorter times in huge numbers are the keys to seeing viruses propagate so quickly. Locking cities down with millions of inhabitants seems like a quick reaction rather than a protocol move but we will learn from this.
We mustn't forget either that with SARS, the number one recommendation from the WHO was not to wear masks but to wash hands frequently.
Curiously and nothing to do with this virus, my regular visit Carrefour (hypermarket) has had a hand and cart handle cleaning station at the cart pick-up point for the last year or two. Along with free bags and ice and digital thermometers to check fresh fish temperature at purchase.
More curiously, I wonder if China could couple AI and video surveillance/face recognition to track movements of people that have been in the company of infected people.
If they aren't capable yet, I'm sure it will be on the cards for the future.
Maybe China should consider a solution revolving around known public health practices instead of ancient medicine, wild animal markets, and primitive working and living conditions that are part and parcel of everyday life for a vast number of Chinese citizens.
Surveillance didn't seem to have any impact on the death of 200 million pigs, half the pig population in China, due to the African Swine Fever, and it certainly wouldn't have any impact on a large portion of the Chinese population that isn't under daily surveillance, especially given that there isn't a sufficiently large and well trained medical community in China to actually treat people in a major epidemic, nor are there even enough forces in place to enforce a quarantine in a timely fashion.
It took Spain 35 years to eradicate African Swine Fever in its pork production, and China hasn't even mastered the basics of industrial animal husbandry, so how would we expect China to stop a human epidemic in a reliable way?
Absolutely everything in that article is applicable to China today. There are direct parallels to be drawn on every level.
China has gone through the exact same changes as Spain over the last 30 years. Economically, culturally and scientifically.
In terms of scale though, the task is far more daunting for China. Ironically, the authoritarian nature of the Chinese government could be an advantage in some areas. The Chinese are used to the idea of surveillance and having facial recognition on different levels. Drastic measures like city wide containment are far easier to approve on a political level.
On a technological level, China is entering the AI age at breakneck speed. 5G is now a reality and it won't be long before different elements come together to help manage these kinds of situations. Everything from the mathematical approach mentioned in the article through to realtime and historical tracking of people who have been in known incident areas and the resulting big data supercomputing processes and visualisation efforts will benefit from what China is doing.
Just like in Spain though, bad habits persist in spite of them reducing with each generation. Food and food hygiene is one area where things need to improve more.
In all probability, this virus has its emergence in the same environment that avian flu came from. We learnt quickly that bird migration couldn't be stopped but people migrate too. Criss crossing the globe like never before. Many acting as carriers without manifesting symptoms.
Other things that are culturally common such as spitting in the street will also slowly disappear. Perhaps these incidents will actually accelerate change.
Climate change is also pushing pathogens into new areas and viruses are becoming common where incidence was previously low.
On top of viruses that come to Spain for example through infected people, we are now seeing autoctonous infections resulting from invasive species.
Changes in education, habits, laws etc combined with the next industrial revolution (telecommunications, AI etc) could well prove to be of enormous value at some point in the future. Maybe the near future.
I mean, what the fuck.
Do you even read any news about the coronavirus in China? It has been linked to "wet markets" which sell live wildlife for human consumption, and isn't linked to the avian flu. More to the point, there are huge populations in China that aren't under observation by surveillance systems, and these people are likely to have the very worst medical care.
"Ironically, the authoritarian nature of the Chinese government could be an advantage in some areas.
That's fucking bullshit. The Chinese could have adequate healthcare if the Chinese Government made it a priority. Instead, the Government is making surveillance and population control, plus a massive expenditure on growth of its military expansionism their priority. They have no inherent advantage over a Western government in controlling an epidemic, and given their penchant for hiding the facts on the epidemic, they have made it worse. Of, course, there would be an advantage in hiding the body count, given the control the government has over the press.
Sometimes, you should just shut the fuck up with your misinformation.
I never said this virus was related or linked to avian flu.
I said that, in all probability, they had their roots in the same environment. That is:
Close and regular contact with livestock. Poor hygiene practices both pre and post slaughter and pre and post sale.
You simply imagined what I said, jumping in at the deep end again.
China has the largest facial recognition database on the planet. Who said everyone was being tracked using facial recognition?
Your imagination running wild?
China is unique in its facial recognition and tracking ability. This can have both nefarious and positive uses. More than 52 countries worldwide are using Chinese technology in this sense. AI is becoming a major part of the technology.
"Thirty-one of the 33 positive samples were collected from the western zone of the market, where booths of wildlife trading concentrated. The result suggests that the novel coronavirus outbreak is highly relevant to the trading of the wild animals, experts said.
The successful isolation of the novel coronavirus further substantiates that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market contains a large quantity of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), according to the experts."
Read the above slowly. It had nothing to do with "Close and regular contact with livestock"
In 1999 I listened in on a panel of virologists on the BBC World Service.
Their unanimous conclusion was that this century would be the century of the virus and that is how it is playing out, both animal to animal and animal to human.
Industrialised farming and our ability to travel the world in ever shorter times in huge numbers are the keys to seeing viruses propagate so quickly. Locking cities down with millions of inhabitants seems like a quick reaction rather than a protocol move but we will learn from this.
We mustn't forget either that with SARS, the number one recommendation from the WHO was not to wear masks but to wash hands frequently.
Curiously and nothing to do with this virus, my regular visit Carrefour (hypermarket) has had a hand and cart handle cleaning station at the cart pick-up point for the last year or two. Along with free bags and ice and digital thermometers to check fresh fish temperature at purchase.
More curiously, I wonder if China could couple AI and video surveillance/face recognition to track movements of people that have been in the company of infected people.
If they aren't capable yet, I'm sure it will be on the cards for the future.
Maybe China should consider a solution revolving around known public health practices instead of ancient medicine, wild animal markets, and primitive working and living conditions that are part and parcel of everyday life for a vast number of Chinese citizens.
Surveillance didn't seem to have any impact on the death of 200 million pigs, half the pig population in China, due to the African Swine Fever, and it certainly wouldn't have any impact on a large portion of the Chinese population that isn't under daily surveillance, especially given that there isn't a sufficiently large and well trained medical community in China to actually treat people in a major epidemic, nor are there even enough forces in place to enforce a quarantine in a timely fashion.
It took Spain 35 years to eradicate African Swine Fever in its pork production, and China hasn't even mastered the basics of industrial animal husbandry, so how would we expect China to stop a human epidemic in a reliable way?
Absolutely everything in that article is applicable to China today. There are direct parallels to be drawn on every level.
China has gone through the exact same changes as Spain over the last 30 years. Economically, culturally and scientifically.
In terms of scale though, the task is far more daunting for China. Ironically, the authoritarian nature of the Chinese government could be an advantage in some areas. The Chinese are used to the idea of surveillance and having facial recognition on different levels. Drastic measures like city wide containment are far easier to approve on a political level.
On a technological level, China is entering the AI age at breakneck speed. 5G is now a reality and it won't be long before different elements come together to help manage these kinds of situations. Everything from the mathematical approach mentioned in the article through to realtime and historical tracking of people who have been in known incident areas and the resulting big data supercomputing processes and visualisation efforts will benefit from what China is doing.
Just like in Spain though, bad habits persist in spite of them reducing with each generation. Food and food hygiene is one area where things need to improve more.
In all probability, this virus has its emergence in the same environment that avian flu came from. We learnt quickly that bird migration couldn't be stopped but people migrate too. Criss crossing the globe like never before. Many acting as carriers without manifesting symptoms.
Other things that are culturally common such as spitting in the street will also slowly disappear. Perhaps these incidents will actually accelerate change.
Climate change is also pushing pathogens into new areas and viruses are becoming common where incidence was previously low.
On top of viruses that come to Spain for example through infected people, we are now seeing autoctonous infections resulting from invasive species.
Changes in education, habits, laws etc combined with the next industrial revolution (telecommunications, AI etc) could well prove to be of enormous value at some point in the future. Maybe the near future.
I mean, what the fuck.
Do you even read any news about the coronavirus in China? It has been linked to "wet markets" which sell live wildlife for human consumption, and isn't linked to the avian flu. More to the point, there are huge populations in China that aren't under observation by surveillance systems, and these people are likely to have the very worst medical care.
"Ironically, the authoritarian nature of the Chinese government could be an advantage in some areas.
That's fucking bullshit. The Chinese could have adequate healthcare if the Chinese Government made it a priority. Instead, the Government is making surveillance and population control, plus a massive expenditure on growth of its military expansionism their priority. They have no inherent advantage over a Western government in controlling an epidemic, and given their penchant for hiding the facts on the epidemic, they have made it worse. Of, course, there would be an advantage in hiding the body count, given the control the government has over the press.
Sometimes, you should just shut the fuck up with your misinformation.
I never said this virus was related or linked to avian flu.
I said that, in all probability, they had their roots in the same environment. That is:
Close and regular contact with livestock. Poor hygiene practices both pre and post slaughter and pre and post sale.
You simply imagined what I said, jumping in at the deep end again.
China has the largest facial recognition database on the planet. Who said everyone was being tracked using facial recognition?
Your imagination running wild?
China is unique in its facial recognition and tracking ability. This can have both nefarious and positive uses. More than 52 countries worldwide are using Chinese technology in this sense. AI is becoming a major part of the technology.
"Thirty-one of the 33 positive samples were collected from the western zone of the market, where booths of wildlife trading concentrated. The result suggests that the novel coronavirus outbreak is highly relevant to the trading of the wild animals, experts said.
The successful isolation of the novel coronavirus further substantiates that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market contains a large quantity of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), according to the experts."
Read the above slowly. It had nothing to do with "Close and regular contact with livestock"
You were wrong.
Again.
Do you think the seafood traded itself?
Why do you think the virus was able to go human to human so quickly?
Your link even uses basically the same word I used (environmental). The irony!
Now, think about it. Who shared that environment with the seafood in that market? It wasn't SpongeBob!
That said. The worst thing about your post though is not that you were wrong in your attack because you failed to comprehend what was actually written beforehand. It was because you jumped in like you did and then utterly failed to recognise the fact that you had made a mistake and then crowned it with a truly absurd claim.
Absurd for the reasons pointed out at the start of this post.
It doesn't matter if it was that market or any other. Problems like this can emerge at any place where humans are in repeated close contact with food (live, dead, processed or unprocessed) and in unhygienic conditions. It could even have been one of those boats where seafood is processed onboard at sea. Avian flu was simply an example of one such case. E. coli although a bacterium would be another example along with hundreds of others.
Trying to imply otherwise is just absurd.
And that is without losing track of the fact that we are talking about probabilities, nothing more. There are also other options for the origin of the virus but they take nothing away from my previous statements.
People on the internet in the area report that the number of actual infected is about 90-100k. Chinese gov-t, just like soviet gov-t, simply downplays the issue.
If you’re going to quote a number like that, I would provide references. People should know more than, “people on the internet.”
You do realize that 90 000 infected people is nothing for China, where the entire population is 1.5B?
I dont get all this skepticism, because I am surprised that it is not in the millions, given how poor the Chinese heath system is and how close people live to each other there and to animals. Anyway, here is a link. NYP talks about it here... the article should have a link to the video.
Oh brother. First of all, the number of infected the entire world for the SARS virus was 8000. How did they get 90000 so soon? The article said the nurse did not tell how she arrived at her numbers. Sorry, bad reference at the NYPost with its tabloid headlines knows it. If this ever hit close to home, you would hope you would get accurate information. 90000 my ass.
Also, she might be getting accurate information, or she might be lying. Which way are you prepared to be wrong?
And I could make a statement that I was visited by aliens who said they are planning to take over the earth. I could be lying, I could be telling the truth. Should we be prepared for that too? Do you see the absurdity of acting on statements for which there is no valid proof?
Based on mortality rate numbers coming out of China (2.99%), if this Coronavirus goes worldwide we’re talking about a potential death toll of 277 million people. SARS and MERS were a concern, but this one has the potential to drastically affect populations everywhere and it continues to spread very rapidly.
I have a guy at work that believes that this was supposed to be a man made virus that China was going to add to its arsenal and it got away from them and now they are scrambling to downplay its effectiveness
Comments
"Thirty-one of the 33 positive samples were collected from the western zone of the market, where booths of wildlife trading concentrated. The result suggests that the novel coronavirus outbreak is highly relevant to the trading of the wild animals, experts said.
The successful isolation of the novel coronavirus further substantiates that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market contains a large quantity of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), according to the experts."
Read the above slowly. It had nothing to do with "Close and regular contact with livestock"
You were wrong.
Again.
Why do you think the virus was able to go human to human so quickly?
Your link even uses basically the same word I used (environmental). The irony!
Now, think about it. Who shared that environment with the seafood in that market? It wasn't SpongeBob!
That said. The worst thing about your post though is not that you were wrong in your attack because you failed to comprehend what was actually written beforehand. It was because you jumped in like you did and then utterly failed to recognise the fact that you had made a mistake and then crowned it with a truly absurd claim.
Absurd for the reasons pointed out at the start of this post.
It doesn't matter if it was that market or any other. Problems like this can emerge at any place where humans are in repeated close contact with food (live, dead, processed or unprocessed) and in unhygienic conditions. It could even have been one of those boats where seafood is processed onboard at sea. Avian flu was simply an example of one such case. E. coli although a bacterium would be another example along with hundreds of others.
Trying to imply otherwise is just absurd.
And that is without losing track of the fact that we are talking about probabilities, nothing more. There are also other options for the origin of the virus but they take nothing away from my previous statements.
hes sort of a conspiracy nut
It turns out that this is the Canadian company which correctly predicted the spread of the virus:
https://bluedot.global/