i am not for sure that's more likely than the situation of people eating infected bats or other animals infected by bats. the chinese do not have great hygiene when it comes to food sourcing, preparation, and consumption. the chinese have all sorts of "beliefs" about food and are very stubborn to accept change. for example, thinking hot water as a sort of elixir and cleanser (e.g., killing parasites). oh look, it's served in hot water, so it's fine. also, the shared eating style (i.e., using a lazy susan) is not exactly a great way to contain illness, even if the food itself is fine.
Well, to be fair to them, in America, we have rural hicks in the midwest hunting rabbits, squirrels, snakes, hamsters, and other mammals for recreational food. These are wild animals that possibly carry rabies and other diseases. And didn’t the Hantavirus from the 90s originate from infected rodents in the United States?
Do you want to educate these fellow Americans to not consume such possibly infected wildlife? Because surely, they live in America, and they ought to know better.
And if you’re on a deserted island, then you’d probably eat these animals too, if you wanted to survive.
And sharing food on the lazy Susan is perfectly fine, just use a sterile serving spoon, and don’t lick the handle. Don’t you eat dinner this way with your own family meals?
Currently, the scientists don’t know yet where this vector originated from. And they are locking down the city out of an abundance of caution.
Perhaps this episode will force them to implement strict meat sourcing requirements. Such as, all meat sold for consumption, must come from a farm, and pass a food handling certification process.
This is clearly a very expensive operation and administration, but they just quarantined a city, so that is an even more expensive and politically damaging event.
The first step in preventing such an outbreak from happening again in the future, is in personal education, and a reinforcement of following basic hygiene practices. Perhaps this event will finally trigger the China central government to mandate such a national education process for everyone.
the rural hicks you mentioned are an extremely small minority in the u.s., found in the backwoods of louisiana and kentucky and the like. the majority of people find this practice uncouth. the one food style i mentioned is overwhelmingly the majority in china.
> And sharing food on the lazy Susan is perfectly fine, just use a sterile serving spoon, and don’t lick the handle. Don’t you eat dinner this way with your own family meals?
i have never seen ANY chinese meal served from a lazy susan use individual serving spoons for the individual meals. everyone uses their own chopsticks to grab the food and put it in their plate or they simply eat directly from the shared plate. if there is a serving spoon for a dish, sometimes provided by restaurants, individual chopsticks are still used to help.
it is a rather major faux pas in american eating to use any utensil used by an individual to touch or serve a shared dish. it is overwhelmingly the case that a serving spoon is dedicated to a dish and is only used to move the food to an individual's plate.
now, i would imagine this culture difference of eating is probably a minor one in the grand scheme of food hygeine (preparation and sourcing being more important i think), but i think it's pretty easy to say one is healthier than another.
in china, it is a constant battle to ask and understand how a dish was sourced and prepared, as most of it is taken as is by chinese. the eating habits are unchangeable at a local level and one must deal with it.
A recent Time article [1] is theorizing that the source may come from wet markets.
It also theorized that the source of the SARS virus might have originated from an infected cat. And Ebola may have originated from infected bat feces, that might have landed on a girl’s toy, which she then put into her mouth. And the MERS virus in the Middle East may have come from an infected camel.
This appears to be a logical and scientific deduction.
So for this Coronavirus, it appears to follow the same pattern. Infected animal feces mutated into some virus, that made the transmission to humans.
My theory, is that perhaps an infected animal’s feces, may have mixed with other fluids, like blood, from freshly slaughtered animals, and mutated into something that infected a human with a weakened immune system (easy target), who then transmitted it to other healthy humans by contact.
On one hand, it does seem that the best way to guarantee that you’re sourcing your meat from a fresh and healthy animal, is to pick the animal that you want, and to slaughter it on the spot. This means that the meat vendor does not have to maintain a refrigeration system, and you don’t introduce other chemicals or salts to preserve your meat.
But the problem is that you have to keep the animals in captivity, and the meat vendor must handle, and clean all their urine and feces. And when animals get sick, their feces and urine gets infected, thus you increase the probability of an outbreak like this.
What’s the solution? Maybe China must begin eliminating wet markets, and eliminate the practice of keeping live animals in captivity, in order to minimize the incubation, mutation, and the transmission of such viruses. And instead, to begin using a refrigeration system, to preserve slaughtered animals.
my original comment was on the likelihood of this originating in a market versus a lab-based outbreak. of course most chinese do not eat bat. i didn't imply they did. the comment you replied to was me dismissing the commenter's argument. but the wuhan market and its patrons do eat bats and other animals that could already be infected by bats. so it's not far fetched that the virus did indeed originate there vs a lab leak.
the latter part of my comment was regarding the potential spread of disease. your comment addresses someone who already knows they are sick. the onset period of this virus is one to two weeks. that's a minimum of 14-21 meals before any symptoms show up, leaving plenty of time for person to person transmission. that plus the density of china's major cities and this particular time of year regarding travel yields a rather fertile ground for disease spread.
