
Is China Ground Zero for a Future Pandemic? (2017) - ycombonator
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/china-ground-zero-future-pandemic-180965213/
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mc32
I wonder if this will be the final nail in the coffin for wet markets and in
particular game markets, given this history.

I mean not just in official proclamation but resulting in the complete
disappearance even in rural backwaters.

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Supermancho
> I wonder if this will be the final nail in the coffin for wet markets

You can't stop it anytime soon. There will always be underground community wet
markets. A high level engineer, that used to work for Disney, happens to be a
close family friend (my brother's Godparent^).

He was contracted out to work on the Ghost cities' transportation lines. As
it's been documented, they were the planned destination for the forcible
relocation of rural residents. At least, as much of the rural population as
China thought they could move. In the test cases, the farmers just ended up
reverting to american homeless-style survival, as they didn't stay in their
sterile buildings for very long and ended up scavenging/defecating on the
streets and trying to escape back to the jungle, as you might expect.

After almost 2 years of working by commuting to-from China, one day he saw an
accident where some workers got killed and he got the VERY strong sense that
he might not be allowed to leave, due to his danger of leaking the story. He
calmly finished out that month, came back home to the US and promptly told
Disney he wasn't going back. Since it was insisted that the work continue, he
stepped down.

^ This informs me, while it should just be a rumor to anyone else.

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frandroid
What does Disney have to do with this

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DyslexicAtheist
what makes these wet markets different to similar cases in Africa where "bush
meat" is consumed? Is it just an equal risk in China as it is in Africa or is
there something unique about China (e.g. climate, lack of oversight, central
planning)? Or is it just the news cycle and that we choose focus on China
right now since the recent bird flu and SARS being fresh in memory?

whoever wrote this must have felt like a modern Cassandra.

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realityking
From my understanding China’s population density (it’s very urbanized at this
point) and interconnection with global travel make it more dangerous.

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zachguo
This is just a side effect of rapid urbanization. Progress in hygiene and
education is not up to speed with the concentration of population.

The next one will probably be from SE Asia or Africa.

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meh2frdf
Yes

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ng7j5d9
Hooray! We can finally dispose of Betteridge's "Law"!

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gdilla
Should China pay some sort of reparations? Maybe in the form of contributing
to a WHO preparedness fund/initiative with stocking supplies that could be
deployed faster next time? China needs to pay for their 1) lack of sanitary
standards surrounding their markets and 2) their coverup which exacerbated the
situation.

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quicklime
A lot of countries did a poor job of the initial handling of the outbreak,
which is why we're in this mess right now. If we're going to demand
reparations from countries for a cover-up and exacerbating the situation, it
shouldn't be limited to just China.

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cadmuxe
People are blaming China didn't do proper job in the initial one month, but
ignore what US did barely nothing in the following two months with knowing
it's a dangerous virus.

And also they think one organization can know everything and recognize a
global Pandemic just with a few cases. Oh man, if this kind of decision maker
existed, We should do whatever we can to bring him/her to the coding industry.
We will have bug-free softwares with his/her insight.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/fl7m3z/the_fir...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/fl7m3z/the_first_coronavirus_case_in_the_us_and_south/)

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JPKab
This is a straw man argument.

Most Americans are angry at their own government's response to a catastrophe,
AND angry at the CCP for creating the catastrophe. (No, not the virus. The
catastrophe is the virus' spread when it was preventable.)

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guacamole4
China's official stance is that virus was developed by CIA and brought to
Wuhan by US military [1]. So they'll have to reopen wet markets or else be
seen as admitting that the virus actually originated in one of them in China
rather than in a CIA lab.

[1]
[https://twitter.com/zlj517/status/1238111898828066823](https://twitter.com/zlj517/status/1238111898828066823)

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btilly
Please don't spread conspiracy theories without linking to a reliable source.

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MikeHolman
Defnitely not the official stance, but Lijian Zhao (China Spokesperson &
Deputy Director General, Information Department, Foreign Ministry) tweeted "It
might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan."

[https://twitter.com/zlj517/status/1238111898828066823](https://twitter.com/zlj517/status/1238111898828066823)

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knzhou
Just as Tom Cotton (Senator from Arkansas) declared on Fox news that it was a
Chinese bioweapon. All governments have wingnuts.

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Natsu
I think it's clearly not a bioweapon, and there would be no benefit to China
for releasing it, but it's exactly the sort of thing that lab was
investigating, so part of me wonders if there wasn't a leak of a research
sample. Even if it were so, I would never blame all Chinese people for it.

~~~
btilly
Occam's razor is for the obvious, it was a cross species jump of a disease
from another animal (in this case a bat). Which happens somewhat regularly,
and was already known to be a concern.

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Natsu
Maybe, but I somehow don't feel like their government would have fought to
hide as much info about it unless they were embarrassed about something, so I
feel like the razor cuts the other way. Can we really trust a government that
hid things for so long? That said, I doubt we'll have any real proof one way
or another.

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btilly
Local officials hid information because nobody wants to be the bearer of bad
news. This is an ancient tradition in China.

Once the news bubbled up to smart people at the top who understood math, their
reaction reversed.

There is no way that if people at the top had known what was really going on,
they would have let the Moon festival happen.

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shaan1
It's not about China. It could have happened anywhere in the world. It's about
any authoritarian or communist regimes. It's about hiding the information from
surfacing. More people should be speaking out about such regimes.

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throwaway5752
Everyone ought to be really aware, before trying to overascribe this to
particular groups of people, that the US is nearing a massive problem from
Chronic Wasting Disease which could be a 100% currently fatal human-to-human
retransmissible prion. We are currently mismanaging to it, and given the
environmental persistence and difficulties destroying prions, could put this
to shame.

The most recent H1N1 influenza (2009) which has been widely in the news
originated in N. America (Mexico or US). The first "Spanish" flu H1N1 cases
were in Kansas in 1917.

China should deal with wet markets with wild game. They are a profoundly
dangerous environment for zoonotic crossover. It a good bet there will be
changes since China had such a close brush with collapse. Nobody should think
this is unique to China since it's false and unhelpful.

