A couple of days ago, Hua Chunying, a Chinese spokesman, posted a frustrated post in regard to stories accusing the Chinese of delaying supplying information regarding COVID 19 to the world.
I don't know how quickly China altered other nations, but the country is insular by nature. Did the warning come soon enough? I don't know that it would have mattered if it came any sooner. It might have, or it might not have. The key, really, was Chinese lunar new year, which spread the disease all around China, and around the globe. Chinese lunar new year this year was January 25.
Anyhow, there's some good evidence that the US was aware of early warnings on the disease and somewhat disregarded them, in spite of intelligence warnings. Be that as it may, it's interesting to note that the first thing that the US did in response to the epidemic, as it was at that time, was to ban travel from China.
Which resulted in the Administration getting criticism that it was being typically draconian and overreacting. We now know that was precisely the right thing to do, but it didn't go far enough. Maybe nothing would have worked, but at the same time, given the realities of global travel, the Administration really should have banned incoming travel from anywhere, which would have seen, up until about three weeks ago, draconian in the extreme.
Anyhow, Hua Chunying's frustrated Twitter received a reply from Liz Cheney. The exchange is below.
But it does appear to have jumped from bats to people in a wet market, and something really does need to be done about that. A wet market is a market in which live animals are sold for consumption.
Now, I'm not going to go all full bore fanatic on this the way some, as in if it isn't done in my culture it shouldn't be done. But wet markets are a real anachronism that really ought to go in general. Crowing ducks, chickens, pigs etc. etc., live in a densely populated city is just asking for trouble, and trouble we now have. We've known this forever.
Indeed, wet markets once existed all over the world, but in the western world they've mostly ceased. Mexico, I believe, still has wet markets, but it's an exception in the northern hemisphere of the Americas, and they ought to stop it as well. Its not that I think people shouldn't eat ducks, chickens, pigs, etc., but packing them in like this is a really bad idea. And mixing them in with wild animals that have had no close care (assuming that in Asia domestic animals do, which is another topic entirely), is a really bad idea. Eating wild animals is fine, if they're in the range of animals that people eat (which some of the things in Chinese markets are not), but they should be procured directly in the wild.
Put another way, would you want deer from Wyoming, which are exhibiting a terrible Chronic Wasting Disease outbreak, shoved into a pen, live, next to a pig, and sold downtown in your city?
I didn't think so.
And maybe some in Asia is actually now being done, although its not enough. China banned the sale of wild animals at wet markets on January 1, 2020, fourteen days prior to the event noticed above, but clearly after they knew that they had a real problem. Wet markets in general ought to entirely go, but that's a step in the right direction.
There's an interesting cultural angle at work here that absolutely prohibits Western nations from criticizing anything about non western ones, while at the same time westerners are free to demand that other westerners stop their own long held practices. Indeed, this exchange provoked the expected replies. An example is here:
Replying to
@Liz_Cheney
That’s impressively racist, even graded on the GOP bigotry curve.
No, it's not racist at all.
The Chinese and other Asian "wet" markets are ideal breeding grounds for the communication and jump of viruses from animals to humans. They simply are. There's a reason that nearly every new version of the flu comes out of Asia, and it isn't because the flu vacations there. The flu is a real killer, and Asian conditions are the ideal breeding ground for it. The Chinese themselves may have finally taken the first step to stopping this, although it doesn't go far enough.
And in recent years, it hasn't just been the flu. The prequel to COVID 19 was SARS and SARS 2, which is another coronavirus. It's still around, but it seems to have been brought under control. It seems, also, to have pretty much the same type of origin as COVID 19, with bats as its donor, but with civet cats in the transmission chain.
The third big one in recent years is MERS. It doesn't have an Asian origin, but rather a Middle Eastern one.
Source of the virus
From the World Health Organization.
Okay, why does this matter? Well let's consider a comment from the Lancet regarding MERS:
Stopping the disease will be best achieved by prevention at the source. Like John Snow, who removed the handle of the water pump on Broad Street following the cholera outbreak in London, public health officials need to find the key lever at the sources of disease through a greater understanding of the enzootic patterns.
The long and the short of it is that things like this likely broke out in these locations repeatedly in the past. Humans in those regions were lucky in that none of them were as deadly as the Great Plague, which broke out in Europe due to the vile conditions in Medieval cities. But of note there, the Plague doesn't break out anymore as people don't let the conditions that cause it arise.
The Chinese were doing little, or at least not enough about the situation which has given rise to this, until the outbreak occurred. They knew exactly where to go, and that it was the "wet market".
A wet market slaughters meat right on the spot. No USDA veterinarians inspecting the facilities in that instance. And the Chinese retain a fondness for exotic foods that are often eaten due to folklore. Bats caught wherever bats are caught and brought right into the market with Bat Funk.
Indeed, common sense would lead you to the conclusion bats aren't food. Eating a bat basically violates the cardinal rule of omnivores and predators that they don't eat each other. It's not safe. Wolves don't eat coyotes, lions don't eat hyenas. You get the picture. People eating bats is, frankly, flat out weird and ought to stop.
But this is only part of the strange Chinese table demand, which retains a lot of folk items that are consumed on demonstratively false assumptions about them, including species that shouldn't be eaten at all as they're a danger to humans.
And as noted, we'd have a fit if there was a downtown market with deer hauled freshly off the range this morning shoved into a pen next to pigs and chickens. And we indeed should, that wouldn't be safe.
Thousands will now die all over the globe due to this. And if we include SARS and SARS 2, this is the third time in recent years, excluding all the version of the flu that come out of Asia, that this has occurred. With the rapid speed of modern transportation, every local epidemic will now become a pandemic.
Now, the largest wet markets in the world are closed as to the sale of wild animals, but they aren't closed. Closing them would be swimming massively against the cultural tide, but it is something that has disappeared in the West. Indeed, if it was suggested we reopen them here, there'd be howls of protests from the same classes that protest that noting the Chinese situation is somehow inappropriate. And indeed, telling others what they can and cannot eat, and can and cannot do is something that we should always think twice about. But here's an example of where something really needs to change.
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