Is China Ground Zero for a Future Pandemic? (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Is China Ground Zero for a Future Pandemic? (2017)

smithsonianmag.com

94 pointsycombonator68 comments

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.

We can only hope so. Unfortunately animal agriculture as it currently exists is just as dangerous (e.g. chicken CAFOs breeding bird flu). IMO we need to rethink meat production altogether. Meat production needs to be environmentally conscious, health/epidemiologically conscious and at least minimally animal welfare conscious and the price of meat should reflect that all of that extra work is being done.

You are absolutely right. Viruses proliferate in large groups of animals in the conditions we keep them in. So much so that we routinely euthanize millions of animals to prevent viral outbreaks. Avian flu and swine flu both can mutate into global plagues. And we continue - business as usual.

That is quite possible. I wouldn't be surprised if - once all this is over - wet markets are seen as having a similarly skewed risk profile as, e.g., 1st-to-3rd generation nuclear reactors. No problems most of the time; downside risk dominated by rare yet devastating black swans.

> 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.

What does Disney have to do with this

The UN should pass a resolution. 100% global sanctions on any country that allows these.

I don’t think you can force something like that on poor countries without a plan for compensation and restructuring some of their food production and distribution.

You might have heard of some Asian country which holds a permanent seat and veto on the Security Council, the only UN body which can effectively enforce anything...

If I remember figures properly, wet market and other exotic animal husbandry industry in China employs close to 10 million. Extrapolate for rest of the world (bushmeat etc). It's not going to get banned, even the one in China I surmise is going to be temporary like SARS, albeit depends on domestic backlash. If anything there will be some actual enforced regulation / intervention to reduced risks. I.e. maybe everyone who works or interacts with the industry will be tracked using technology developed for COVID quarantine.

Also it's important to highlight, there is NO evidence the wet market was the source of COVID, they found older cases back in mid November with no relation to it. The wet market was simply the first hotspot - and seeing how contagious the virus is even in clean environments, the level of squalor wouldn't have made much of a difference. The authorities closed it down because that's where tracing led them, which led to conjecture that inertia-ed into likely cause. Now you still have idiots who thinks it's bat soup. I haven't seen a correction at all since there's more pressing local COVID news. It's like the last ebola outbreak, people were blaming Africans for eating bush meat but patient-0 was traced to a kid playing under a tree where some bats slept in.

True we don’t know the origin of this one, but the article mentions other viruses over the years and decades that mutated from jumping from animal to human to human to human having their start in places in China where close interaction with these animals occurs (either animal husbandry or as bushmeat).

I think the situation will eventually converge to a point where certain animals will be banned, but not the market themselves. The markets will probably be moved into buildings with better sanitation and surveillance with modernized regulations. IMO High density Chinese pork farming, which caused the disastrous pork crisis due to African swine flu last year is a more likely vector for future outbreaks. China has to move to high-density animal husbandry for food autonomy, especially pork. It's one of their key strategic interests that's not going to change, or is even more important to pursue depending on the geopolitical fallout of this pandemic. If anything now is the time to focus and embrace artificial meat. But at the end of the day, it doesn't resolve the fundamental unpreparedness of the world if the cause of COVID was some chance happenstance like some farmer smelled some bat poop.

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.

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

China is much more internationally connected and densely populated than Africa is. Pretty much why the rate of international infection skyrocketed after the disease got to Italy.

Africa also it's share of problems and diseases.See Ebola.

“Wet market” is like combination slaughter house and grocery store where floor never dries from constantly hosing down fluids. It’s not sanitary.

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.

Yes

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

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.

They could start by shutting down all of the wet markets.

They've done that.

I thought they have only banned the farming and consumption of wild animals? I can't find any reference to banning wet markets.

They haven't done it permanently yet though

Edit: For the downvoters, here's evidence of a TEMPORARY ban

https://www.businessinsider.com/wuhan-coronavirus-chinese-we...

Please refute me with evidence of a permanent ban. Otherwise, you're being counter productive

This

So do we do this next time any new illness spread? what if it happened to a poor country? Is this going to be coded as an international law? If so why is the law retrospective? Considering your 1) lack of sanitary standards is more prevalent in poorer countries is the law discriminatory?

Yes, if it turns out a poor country lied and imprisoned doctors attempting to disseminate facts, then yes, they ought to be punished internationally..

We shouldn't punish China for simply having the virus. That could happen to anyone. But lying about it on the world stage for months, imprisoning whistleblower doctors, etc is reprehensible behavior.

Links to this?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-it-all-started-chinas-early...

China misled WHO into thinking the virus wasn't contagious up until Jan 20. On Jan 14th, WHO (https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152) said the virus wasn't contagious on twitter.

China arrested scientist whistleblowers. https://www.businessinsider.com/china-coronavirus-whistleblo...

To top it all off, China attempted to blame the united states for it. https://qz.com/1817736/china-fuels-coronavirus-conspiracy-th...

The Atlantic has a thorough article as well. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/china-trol...

There's no defending any communist regime, but I think the more likely explanation is that China had no reason to suspect that it was anything other than flu for a long time. They made it worse by trying to "manage" the panic by deleting social media posts, etc. And even otherwise, they put their economy ahead of the health of their citizens (like countries are doing even today, like the US).

As far as we know it was identified as a novel pathogen on the 26th December. Its actually hard to know where to collect the sample from, and if you don't know what you're looking for, its extremely easy to miss. You can't just put a virus under a microscope. Its not unreasonable to assume that they didn't have any confirmation for a couple of weeks that the virus they sequenced was the exact same virus for all of the other cases. You need to develop a fool-proof protocol for a diagnostic test that has minimal false-negatives. No easy task to do in 2 weeks, etc, etc...

The lack of sanitary standards in everyday life has always been shocking to me whenever I've visited China to be honest. People often spit on the streets and cough and sneeze without covering their faces, even in the big modern cities.

Someone even vomited on my shoe in a subway station once and then just walked away without even acknowledging that they did it. I'm really not surprised that these diseases show a tendency to start in China.

In Hong Kong and Taiwan it's rather different - hand sanitizer is readily available and people actually wash their hands after using the restroom, etc.

Even in surrounding (and much poorer) South East Asian nations people seem to be much better at maintaining a better level of general hygiene.

Did the US pay reparations to essentially all the nations for the 1918 flu? This originated among cattle in Kansas, and killed 50 million people: more than WW1 and WW2 combined.

Do you have sources for such a claim?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Hypotheses_about_t...

The above claim that it started in Kansas is one hypothesis among many others. This is another hypothesis from the same wikipedia section: "In 1993, Claude Hannoun, the leading expert on the 1918 flu for the Pasteur Institute, asserted the former virus was likely to have come from China."

Coverup, because every country has things that can cause problems for others.

China should have used their resources to seal everything and everyone the minute they knew. I agree with Trump on this one, they should have stopped it there. Bats, civets were all linked to previous infections and we know bats have other viruses waiting for us

They did and now there are no new cases from local transmission.

I trust their statistics and words. Do you?

But either way, now is too late. The entire world got it and tens of millions will de directly or indirectly.

Do you have any proof of that or any way to confirm the data they provided? Some people seem to think that a country known for lying, murdering and disappearing whistleblowers suddenly is an example of transparency and honesty

So do you trust statistics from America then?

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.

If China had been more forthcoming with the nature of the virus, instead of ramping up both internal and external censorship, perhaps the world would have been better prepared. Instead their KGB equivalent went into overdrive. Do you know that in addition to admonishing and disappearing doctors and scientists who dared to blow the whistle, at least one multimillionaire tycoon has been disappeared for criticizing the response? The CCP puts the CCP first, before both global and Chinese citizens.

And before anyone accuses me of nationalism, the US has its own share of worldbuilding to answer for, and our response is also difficult to excuse as US intelligence was no doubt aware of the true danger, considering papers regarding R0 and lethality and such have been floating around since early January. Like credit, assign blame where it is due. The behavior of the CCP is not a reflection on the Chinese people.

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...

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.)

I disagree. We have to understand that this is a massive externality of two decisions made by the Chinese Communist Party:

1.) Not fully enforcing laws regarding wildlife with wet markets, and additionally not having strict enough laws based on experiences with SARS, due to domestic pressure from a sizable group supported by wet markets.

2.) Initial suppression of communications from doctors in Wuhan trying to sound the alarm, including forcing written apologies for "spreading rumors". This suppression allowed for the disease to hit a massive spike due to not cancelling Wuhan's New Years feast.

While the citizens of China were victimized by this horrifically themselves, this doesn't change the culpability of the CCP.

Yes, other countries didn't handle it, but the root cause is the CCP's decisions, both long term and short term. India has a billion people as well, and is also densely populated. We don't see diseases coming from India on a regular basis.

Edit:

I want to add that as a human being, I've been horribly disappointed for years that we have collectively helped oppress over a billion people in China by propping up a government that doesn't respect individual rights via trade. Yes, hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty, but they are under the yoke of a regime that fails them. Other governments fail their citizens as well, but you don't "dissappear" if you complain about these failings publicly.

I value the wonderful contributions and accomplishments of the Chinese people. I just wish I wasn't complicit in them being under the thumb of an authoritarian government.

I mean, this is basically sanctions, right? I guess I would prefer those in charge to weigh the value of holding people responsible vs the chaos that sanctions on China would bring.

How about this. Next time this happens, instantaneous travel and trade ban. Full stoppage.

China moved heaven and earth to stop the virus from spreading. If anyone should pay reparations it's the US for breaking quarantine and spreading the virus when china told them not to.

WHO has commended China for their transparency... your statement is the opposite of reality.

How about reparations from the WHO, for telling countries not to close their borders for fear of “stigma”?

I think that is a slippery slope. Once it was known, other countries did nothing to stop the spread either by allowing free travel rather than going into a lock-down mode. Each country put their economy ahead of the well-being of their citizens. The US is still allowing free travel between states knowing full well that its going to make it worse.

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

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

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

Yes. Highly placed individuals promote conspiracy theories. Given our President's past behavior on Twitter, we are in no position to criticize.

However the official conclusion of China that I have seen matches the international community - this started in a wet market in China.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

He did it because Mike Pompeo keeps calling it the China or Wuhan virus, instead of Covid-19, and it irritates China. Now Trump calls it "China virus" consistently...

There's many ways to debunk Lijian Zhao's conspiracy theory including the fact that the people who participated in the Wuhan military games and admitted to the hospital for an "unknown respiratory illness" was confirmed to be malaria by the hospital itself.

He knows it, and anyone who did brief research knows (there are lots of Chinese who believe it, though...they are the Chinese equivalent to MAGA supporters).

In China, you are not allowed to talk about Wuhan as the source of outbreak anymore [1]. A prominent microbiologist is forced to apologize after saying the virus was originated Wuhan seafood market and blaming the culture of eating wild animals[2]. The whole country is trying to shape US as the source of virus, at least on Chinese social media.

1. https://www.ft.com/content/d420ce18-641f-11ea-b3f3-fe4680ea6... 2. https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/artic... 3. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/world/asia/coronavirus-ch...

> A prominent microbiologist is forced to apologize

Uh, from the literal headline of the article itself, the apology is probably because he blamed it on, quote, "inferior Chinese culture".

And obviously you already knew that. So you're just trying to push a narrative here.

It's not an official stance. It's just yet another fake news from China.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com