Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
It’s the Culture, Stupid! How We Got the Wuhan Coronavirus
With Novel Coronavirus spreading like wildfire everywhere in the world now, perhaps you are wondering where this virus came from in the first place. You might wish to know how it was that last fall in China, someone in the medical establishment there noticed some cases of a particularly nasty pneumonia cropping up around Hubei Province in central China; the capital city of Wuhan in particular.
Let’s start, then, at the beginning. Chinese culture is very old, going back many centuries, and many of the culinary characteristics of today’s China are throwbacks to a much more primitive time. In the long past, like in most countries, the Chinese people lived closer to the forests. In those forests lived many species of animals, and the people killed and ate those animals. When the Chinese people became more civilized and moved into villages and then into cities, they brought many of their culinary tastes with them. Chinese people today still have a taste for unusual foods like pangolin, bats, and shark fins. It is well-known that Chinese will pay good money for some very unusual foods, and that has led to their encouraging of poaching of some endangered species.
Cultures in Africa also have a taste for some exotic wildlife, and many tribes today still live in or near jungles and forests, where they hunt and eat wild animals, sometimes including primates. Here is a picture of a market stall in Africa, where they are selling exotic wildlife for food.
In Africa, this is called “bushmeat”, and you can see the face of a primate among the specimens in this market. It is well-known that some diseases can be spread by the consumption of exotic animals, and that eating the flesh of primates may carry what is known in humans as Creutzfeld-Jakob disease. This is a particularly gruesome, incurable condition that causes the brain to deteriorate.
Getting back to the beginning, scientists for decades have known that many exotic species of forest and jungle wildlife carry their own kinds of viruses and bacteria. In these species, the pathogens often do not cause any kind of adverse effects or illnesses. In fact, we humans also carry many harmless, and sometimes beneficial, viruses and bacteria (bacteria are what actually allows us to digest our food). It is only when humans consume, or live among, these exotic species that their viruses and bacteria can “jump” to humans, and then they can cause very harmful diseases. This process is called “zoonosis”.
In the early 20th Century, it has been determined, the virus that causes AIDS first jumped from African primates to humans. It remained localized for a long time, but eventually made its way into civilization, and was spread very rapidly by homosexual humans and their multiple sex partners (the original “spreader” was a flight attendant who boasted of over 2,500 partners). The Ebola virus, whose name refers to a river in Africa, was spread by Africans and their penchant for eating bushmeat, and it remains a stubborn low-level epidemic in multiple parts of Africa. Eastern Equine Encephalitis is a virus found in horses that can spread to humans, and African Swine Fever has recently decimated the pigs of China (it is similar to Ebola in humans). Scientists and wildlife experts have been trying for decades to get Africans to stop eating bushmeat, but their efforts have been in vain. Culture is just too powerful.
Well, the same kind of situation holds in modern China. The Wuhan Wet Market is an institution in the large capital city of Hubei Province, where citizens can buy all manner of wild animals for food. Investigators have determined that the virus that is now propagating everywhere in the world originated in bats sold in the market. And the Chinese people have proven similarly resistant to giving up their cultural taste for exotic food. The Communist Party has closed the market for now, but the culture does not change that quickly. Here’s a new interesting article.
China has been a Communist country since 1949, and the Party has added another layer of culture over the original Chinese culture. Their culture of secrecy and arrogance contributed in large part to the spread of this new disease. However, their very-Chinese concentration on “saving face” also helped in a big way to keep this world-wide pandemic going. The Communist Party’s prime directive is tranquillity-they will do anything to avoid unrest in the population. So they did things like suppress news of the disease outbreak, and put the doctor who originally told his medical colleagues about it under isolation, making him sign a confession to “spreading rumors”, and condemning him to death from the virus.
Communism is Evil, and it can lead to situations like we are seeing now. People all over the world are succumbing to this previously-unknown virus, and their deaths can be attributed in part to Chinese and Communist Culture.
Crossposted at RushBabe49.com; always welcoming visitors and potential followers]
Published in Culture
One doesn’t even need to hypothesize misconduct. A tech who got contaminated due to BSL 2 practices at a BSL 4 lab in China (yeah, right) and then visited the local Whole Live Foods market could have been the index case.
Focusing on the wet market is silly. It offends western sensibilities, and the epicenter town just happened to have one (like all Chinese cities.) Don’t y’all know about their primitive husbandry? It’s long been recognized that Chinese duck-cheek-by-pig-jowl livestock farming taken to modern industrial scale is a vast viral petri dish.
I don’t think it’s silly, but you’re right that there is more to the problem than that. The combination of wild animals (e.g. civets) and domestic in close proximity, is thought to be a dangerous mix.
No live things outside a few archaea can survive cooking temperature. If the virus had developed at Yellowstone that might be of concern. But if the virus infects a human food handler before the bat is boiled, or if the dog isn’t completely wokked (whoever posted that, it was awful to watch, so here’s a “well done” for you) then it’s off to the races.
They would say it is hegemony that hurts the feelings of the Chinese people. Their usual response.
I was researching the 14th century plague on Google when this story came up on CNN and on the AP from November 2019. For the whole article, here’s the link: https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/13/health/china-plague-intl-hnk-scn-scli/index.html
“Two people in China are being treated for plague, authorities said Tuesday. It’s the second time the disease, the same one that caused the Black Death, one of the deadliest pandemics in human history, has been detected in the region — in May, a Mongolian couple died from bubonic plague after eating the raw kidney of a marmot, a local folk health remedy.
The two recent patients, from the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, were diagnosed with pneumonic plague by doctors in the Chinese capital Beijing, according to state media Xinhua. They are now receiving treatment in Beijing’s Chaoyang District, and authorities have implemented preventative control measures.”
Ugh.
China needs more Jews.
Also when a population first encounters a zoonotic virus via encountering a human population that tolerates it somewhat better. Native Americans first becoming exposed to measles and chickenpox, for example.
I think everyone concerned about the virus should examine this information from Sharyl Atkinson:
When the death toll stood at 48 US Coronavirus Deaths, she tweeted:
Most of the deaths are in Washington State. More than half (25) are from Life Care Center nursing facility in Kirkland, King County, Washington.
It might be worthwhile to figure out what goes on in nursing homes. My experience in the health field indicated most of these places are little more than concentration camps for the elderly, although the sheets are clean and occasionally personnel makes sure the patient is able to be eating the food. But then when families are paying 5K a month for clean sheets and food, they facilities have to offer some of what they promise.
@SharylAttkisson I UPDATED this tonight. 48 US Coronavirus Deaths Most of the deaths are in Washington State. More than half (25) are from Life Care Center nursing facility in Kirkland, King County, Washington.
Didn’t watch the videos. Reading the comments about them was bad enough. When we lived in Beijing in the special foreign housing compounds, I remember seeing a taxi driver trying to lure a dog that was probably some diplomat’s pet into his car. Don’t think he had any plans on finding the dog’s owner.
I’ve just come off a long argument on a local community forum where I had the temerity to call it the Wuhan Virus. Some nitwit, who could easily have been one of the lefties in The Hunt, called me hateful and ignorant.
We need to expose the actions of the Chinese government or we will all suffer through something worse.
We also need to expose the US media and their useful idiots like the nitwit.
Wow, the primate’s face in that African bushmeat picture will haunt my nightmares for months to come.
The “treatment” could well be some lead and the crematorium.
The problem is that we’re going to get hit with a(nother) truly lethal zoonotic epidemic sooner or later. A mutated flu is one possibility.
As bad as COVID-19 might get, the authorities must plan for much worse. Laurie Garrett has been writing about this since The Coming Plague in 1994. It looks as though COVID-19 may turn out to have been a pressure test. On the positive side, it looks like nothing is actually going to explode, but we sure are seeing some leaks.
I listen to a podcast that has Senator Ted Cruz on it. He said while he was aware of the rumor that so far he has seen no evidence that this was a manufactured virus.
I guess that does not rule out that the labs had the virus and were playing with it and it escaped but most of what I have seen tends to believe it is a natural virus.
I’d say he has done this before. He knew just what to do. I wasn’t nearly as neat the first time I pithed a frog in biology lab.
Some questions have been raised as to whether the wetware is properly running the Level 4 hardware.
Maybe their lab practices are good, maybe they’re not. It takes the right structure, the right equipment, the right supplies, the right personnel, the right training, and constant vigilance to pull off a Level 4 operation.
Level 4 containment and face saving coverups cannot coexist for long.
Referring back to the OP, this is one of many critical enterprises that requires a culture of accountability.
This probably sounds terribly ignorant, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to eat in another Chinese restaurant as long as I live.
There is plague in the rodent population of Colorado every year — rabbits, squirrels, prairie dogs — although it is the flea borne variety, not the airborne. I know this because I used to live and work on the west side of Colorado Springs for a private club with a golf course (where the critters hung out), and authorities would lay out PVC pipe lined with peanut butter and flea powder through which the critters would pass and be de-flead. But, in some years, people would visit the parks (Fountain Creek) with large populations of prairie dogs and would contract plague through a flea bite. It is treatable with antibiotics as it is a bacterial infection, not viral. Not a problem if caught quickly.
As I understand it, coronavirus is common with many variants (including common cold) and COVID-19 being a “novel” strain. Its high capacity for mutating makes it difficult to come up with a vaccine, otherwise we would have conquered the common cold a long time ago. Viruses are tough. Bird flu, swine flu, influenza, . . . I suspect safe and effective treatment is our best option, including borrowing antibodies from people who’ve recovered.
I believe the wet markets are a problem not because people are ingesting the animals, but because the unsanitary conditions are ripe for growing and mutating lethal microbes.
As far as the media, Saturday I saw James Woods’ tweet on my twitter feed. I tried to click the URL link to get to the graphic he was posting. I had to click three separate times, letting twitter know I would withstand the over-the-top lewdness and inappropriateness of Woods’ graphic.
This is the graphic I ended up with:
How the feck is the above even remotely inappropriate, lewd, using bad language or anything close to offending community guidelines?!?
####
From the March 15 2020 New England Journal of Medicine:
If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%.
This suggests that the overall clinical consequence of Covid 19 may ultimately be more kin to those of a severe seasonal flu (Which has a case fatality of approximately 0.1%, similar to those influenza seasons of 1957 and 1968 ) rather than a diseases similar to SARS or MERS which had case fatality rates of 9 to 10 % and 36% respectively.”
March 15th 2020 New England Journal of Medicine
####
It is definitely true that with the very poor ability of US hospitals to offer tests to many people, and only to those with serious problems that are at least five to seven days in duration, it is most likely only that any reports of a mortality rate above 0.3% would be wrong. I think it is safe to believe that for most of us, if we get this virus, we will survive.
Nobody said anything about manufacture, and everyone I’ve read is working on the assumption it’s a natural virus. I’ve read accounts, not sure how reliable anything is of course, of a worker at one of those facilities who thought he contracted it before it before anyone else.
If you think about the opportunities for viral mixing, a market of any kind seems unlikely to the point of being contrived when compared to both feeding lots and medical facilities. The first because animals spend months in those conditions, and the bats fly around, and everybody eats everybody’s droppings. The second because that’s the kind of place where we concentrate sicknesses, both by design and inadvertently.
The only reason anyone ever focused on the market is because some Chinese “authority” said so. I guess that’s reliable …
Actually the employees of that lab have a history of selling used lab animals into the wet market.
No, it was focused on because it was determined that is where SARS started in 2003, the issue of these markets (as well as the wildlife farms) as a breeding ground for future viruses was identified at that time, and there is extensive biological literature on the subject since then.
Of that specific lab? I’ve not seen that. There have been scandals in China involving the sale of lab animals from other labs.
Handling the animals or the raw meat is more likely to cause transmission. Heat kills these viruses pretty quickly, so transmission via cooked meat is unlikely.
I’m wondering what would happen if major countries gave China the ultimatum to end the wet markets OR they would all nationalize their China debt?
I was listening the President Trump last night in an extended interview he gave someone. My husband was watching it so I’m not sure where or to whom the president was speaking. I really admired him for his gentle attitude toward China’s culpability.
We should not turn China into a pariah over this. Western Europe turned on Germany after World War I. To some extent, it was unfair to blame Germany completely. World War I was the fault of many countries. In their isolated status in the late 1920s and early 1930s, they became defensive, impoverished, and belligerent. China will do that too if the world’s reaction isn’t tempered with some degree of shared responsibility.
China has been defensive, impoverished and belligerent for a very long time. They have also been offensive and continue to do so. We rushed in to do business as usual with them after Tianmen. We shouldn’t do that again. The regime is enriched and the people of China suffer. Communism is a scourge on the people of the world.
China was admitted to the World Trade Organization under false pretenses, and should be expelled. They are emphatically NOT a market economy, and should not benefit from being considered one. And, under President-For-Life Xi Jinping, they are moving ever farther away from being a market economy, with State-owned enterprises playing an even-greater role than in the past.
The people of China are already impoverished. Only the members of the Communist Party prosper — 94 million out of 1.4 billion.
I want us economically separated from China — especially independent of medical supplies and pharmaceuticals — until the communists fall and are replaced by a truly liberalized system of governance. If Trump is speaking moderately, I think that’s prudent. But, I’d also like him to do whatever it takes to get us out from under China’s thumb on this medical stuff first — and then we can worry about the rest. I don’t trust that any medicines we’re getting from China are efficacious anymore. Think what China could do if it tricked us by reducing the potency of the medications they’re sending us — placebos over the real stuff. I’m even suspicious of my allergy medications. We’ve put ourselves in a terrible position, and Trump knows it better than any president in my lifetime. I’m praying for him.