Wuhan Coronavirus: Megathread - Got too big

[Sulla]

Spoiler

Its plausible. Not to sound like a peta member or anything, but the way chickens are kept in industrial farms, if a virus in chickens ever happens to jump to humans, we're fucked.

But, people who are poor or weird enough to get random bat meat from the local fish shop are probably the sort of people who have had the sort of life experiences that they'd know not to eat their bat cooked to anything less than medium well.

Have you seen these people?
They literally eat live rats and frogs.

Liveleak.com - Eating Baby Mice Alive

Eating Baby Mice Alive. Sucks to be a baby mouse in China...

www.liveleak.com

Liveleak.com - Insane Chinese Man eats live frog

The man approaches a tank where a frog is, grabs it from the tank and..

www.liveleak.com

 

[Spatula]

It's because the virus didn't originate from the market

Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globa…

archived 30 Jan 2020 00:40:23 UTC

archive.ph

I thought you guys were skeptical of chinese information and consider them un-reliable

The paper, written by a large group of Chinese researchers from several institutions, offers details about the first 41 hospitalized patients who had confirmed infections with what has been dubbed 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV)

As I sad, the bat merchant can be patient zero, but he can be the carrier without showing any symptoms.
He sits next to you in the metro and coughs.
Two days later you have a fever and he is fine.

 

[a_lurker]

Have you seen these people?
They literally eat live rats and frogs.

Liveleak.com - Eating Baby Mice Alive

Eating Baby Mice Alive. Sucks to be a baby mouse in China...

www.liveleak.com

Liveleak.com - Insane Chinese Man eats live frog

The man approaches a tank where a frog is, grabs it from the tank and..

www.liveleak.com

Ah, this must be a cultural thing. In the US people like that live far out in the woods and die quietly, away from everyone else

I'm not a skeptic, just slightly drunk.

 

[LetThemEatCake]

But, people who are poor or weird enough to get random bat meat from the local fish shop are probably the sort of people who have had the sort of life experiences that they'd know not to eat their bat cooked to anything less than medium well.

These are people for whom handwashing isn't considered a necessary part of life, and who eat a wide variety of raw or lightly cooked foods and sometimes even living animals.

When people have the kind of weird TCM-based superstitious beliefs that specific foods eaten in a certain form have near-magical health-giving properties, as some Chinese do no matter their social background or status, they'll eat things they really should not.

Anyone with regard for basic food hygiene would not be buying meat of any kind from a Chinese wet markets, which have sub-medieval standards of hygiene and break every rule in the book regarding the most basic food handling practices. They certainly would not consider eating bat in the first place, however well-cooked given they are repositries of some of the worst transmissable-to-man viruses on the planet, including rabies, ebola, nipah virus, SARS and various corona viruses.

 

[a_lurker]

Framed that way, its entirely plausible.


so, do you think china isn't trying to downplay the extent of the infection?
Would it not be in their interests to keep up appearances and sweep this under the rug?

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

Im not sure they could be a first rate country unless their culture, political system, and mindset changed. Chinese generally feel no obligation towards their countrymen and are always cutting corners and putting dangerous shit in their products. My uncle was telling me how the Chinese government had a protein requirement in their tard cum, so farmers who were unable to meet that through their feed gave their cows a chemical that’s poisonous to people if consumed... for a country that’s supposedly thinking 100 years ahead their citizens definitely aren’t.

Their political system will not change.

It is true that the Chinaman naturally has a low morality. He can only behave in a decent and civil fashion when forced to do so by both the political system and the general culture around him.

Why do you think Singapore bans the sale of chewing gum? Why it fines a person caught spitting in the streets more than 700 USD? It is because the Chinaman must be constrained by laws to behave in a civilized way, not to mention the other groups present in that territory. And Singapore is a tiny police state. China is an enormous empire. It is very difficult for the CCP to crack down on the normal behaviour of the Chinaman. It can't ratchet down the pressure on every objectionable behaviour at once.

This is why they try to apply that pressure slowly. With things like social credit systems to restrict the ability of fraudsters to just move on to the next city like some kind of malignant gypsy.

But this event is not going to seriously affect the Chinese empire, and it is not going to damage the power of the CCP. It may cause some economic issues, but it will be properly managed, and will give the CCP more power. More power that they will, hopefully, use to crack down on the regular Chinaman who enjoys torturing animals, who is totally unconcerned for the public good.

Comparisons to Japan are reasonable. The Tokugawas, correctly, opposed Western colonialism and persecuted both colonisers and collaborators for two hundred years before they fagged out and cow-towed to American imperialism in the 1850s. And they fell from power for that crime. The Meiji emperors needed nearly fifty years to build power before they could overturn those colonial treaties. But they did. By the time dreadnaught battleships began to be built, they were sending Japanese workers to learn side by side with their counterparts in Britain, and then bringing Vickers workers over to Japan to assist them in their own shipbuilding efforts soon after.

The Chinaman was only partially freed from direct colonial occupation a century after, and they had been subjected to the 'British' Sassoon family pushing opium on them for a century, which the Japanese had not.

Japanese electronic equipment was still the object of derision in the 60s and 70s. Just as Chinese equipment is now.

Japanese success has been led by a strong, hard, nationalist state. Unfortunately, as someone who doesn't like them, the Chinaman is now blessed by such a state.

 

[IAmNotAlpharius]

These are people for whom handwashing isn't considered a necessary part of life, and who eat a wide variety of raw or lightly cooked foods and sometimes even living animals.

When people have the kind of weird TCM-based superstitious beliefs that specific foods eaten in a certain form have near-magical health-giving properties, as some Chinese do no matter their social background or status, they'll eat things they really should not.

Anyone with regard for basic food hygiene would not be buying meat of any kind from a Chinese wet markets, which have sub-medieval standards of hygiene and break every rule in the book regarding the most basic food handling practices. They certainly would not consider eating bat in the first place, however well-cooked given they are repositries of some of the worst transmissable-to-man viruses on the planet, including rabies, ebola, nipah virus, SARS and various corona viruses.

I have friends that work in pest control and they’ve told me that a lot of Chinese restaurants are not very hygienic, especially if they’re run by first generation immigrants. They’ve told me that it’s generally better by the third generation, but even then they’ve seen some bad restaurants (like the worst one they dealt with they caught hundreds of rodents). The issue is that a lot of first generation Chinese don’t follow instructions or understand why their practices are attracting pests. Basically, they only have pest control because they’re required to.

 

[Shitassdeaddude]

Framed that way, its entirely plausible.


so, do you think china isn't trying to downplay the extent of the infection?
Would it not be in their interests to keep up appearances and sweep this under the rug?

Of course they're downplaying it. They're downplaying it because the way they've handled it so far makes them look like a bunch of fucking clowns. They got caught with their pants down and the whole "Great Asian Empire" facade they've worked so meticulously to keep up is crumbling like wet gram crackers.

Their mad scramble to keep everyone from getting out isn't because they're worried the virus is going to cut a swathe through the world and kill 25% of the population. It's because the virus escaping would (and has already) shown how pathetically inept the CCP is at doing anything with any margin of success. Their reputation is already in shambles and this is a PR nightmare they can't afford.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

Its plausible. Not to sound like a peta member or anything, but the way chickens are kept in industrial farms, if a virus in chickens ever happens to jump to humans, we're fucked.

That's called the bird flu, and all it takes is a few mutations to turn that shit lethal in humans. You might've heard of a thing called "Spanish flu", there's tons of flu viruses that might work like that and many live in chickens.

 

[EmuWarsVeteran]

I don't follow this chain of reasoning.

Sub-Saharan Africans do not share the same quotient of specifically Neanderthal ancestry that other modern human groups do, having either no such ancestry at all, or possibly, some tiny fraction (<0.5% as opposed to 4-10x that elsewhere), a tiny fraction that would have not originated in Africa but instead came back with migration from those outside Africa.

I haven't bothered to follow the literature about when interbreeding is estimated to have occurred, but even that's pretty well known.

Shouldn't have apologized.

That said, as good an intelligence operation as the Chinese empire has inside the United States, it never hurts to just be able to buy access to the latest American military hardware.

Here, have the first of the studies that debunked that shit.

Effect of ancient population structure on the degree of polymorphism shared between modern human populations and ancient hominins

Recent comparisons between anatomically modern humans and ancient genomes of other hominins have raised the tantalizing, and hotly debated, possibility of hybridization. Although several tests of hybridization have been devised, they all rely on the degree to which different modern populations...

www.pnas.org

 

[Sulla]

Spoiler

Their mad scramble to keep everyone from getting out isn't because they're worried the virus is going to cut a swathe through the world and kill 25% of the population. It's because the virus escaping would (and has already) shown how pathetically inept the CCP is at doing anything with any margin of success. Their reputation is already in shambles and this is a PR nightmare they can't afford.

Going to have to disagree with you there, when was the last time the ccp prioritized something over their economy?

as others have pointed out earlier in the thread, the chinese stock market dropped == 8.5%

Spoiler

and thats with restrictions in place to prevent short selling, so the market crash is ongoing.

I don't believe for a second that the ccp is just dabbing while placing these ever increasing quarantines just for funsies.

 

[Shick]

Never played plague inc, but the america planting it is plausible, but TBH, I don't think we have a government competent or cohesive enough to pull off such a job. They're too busy dickpulling and asskissing, gearing up for the election this november.

The glow in the darks don't need to worry about elections unless they're trying to influence them.

For the record, I don't think we're behind it either, but there are plenty of parts of our government that both don't give a rats ass about election season and would be capable of pulling something like this off.

 

[Otterly]

I fail to understand how any such virus could differentiate different races of people at a cellular level effectively.

It is possible. There are slight differences in often quite random things that sometimes roughly align with race or ethnic origin. It’s not ever clear cut, but usually more like ‘people from this country have 20% of people with this gene and people from the other country have 60%.’ Stuff like blood groups for example - different ethnic groups have different distributions.
It doesn’t make much difference in everyday life in most situations. This virus seems to gain entry to cells through a specific cell surface receptor. The number of these receptors people have in their lungs seems to vary geographically (someone posted a paper a while back in the thread about it.) Asians and Asian males in particular have a higher number of them in lung and so are perhaps easier to infect.
It’s not that you can build a race specific plague, more that some groups may be marginally more or less susceptible to a disease. In that light, it’s a perfect storm of bad luck: a more susceptible population, high density farming, poor hygiene and farming practice, wet markets, vector availability, migratory bird routes, high density population, poor infrastructure and terrible political leadership etc.

 

[Sulla]

Spoiler

The glow in the darks don't need to worry about elections unless they're trying to influence them.

For the record, I don't think we're behind it either, but there are plenty of parts of our government that both don't give a rats ass about election season and would be capable of pulling something like this off.

I doubt the US is behind this, what would be the point of this when they are already decisively winning the trade war?

Although how hilarious would it be if this was a stolen US/Canadian bioweapon that they were preemptively trying to make a vaccine for and accidentally released it in the process.

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

Here, have the first of the studies that debunked that shit.

Effect of ancient population structure on the degree of polymorphism shared between modern human populations and ancient hominins

Recent comparisons between anatomically modern humans and ancient genomes of other hominins have raised the tantalizing, and hotly debated, possibility of hybridization. Although several tests of hybridization have been devised, they all rely on the degree to which different modern populations...

www.pnas.org

As opposed to the hundreds which support the fact that Neanderthals and Denisovians contributed to the gene pool of those H. sapiens outside sub-Saharan Africa and developed civilization? Hmm.

 

[Bork Laser]

The problem with the theory of this being an engineered virus is that it showing signs of what typical viruses of this type do, killing off people with compromised immune systems. If you don't have anything that is current fucking with your immune system and somehow manage to get this, you should be ok if you see a doctor and get treatment in time.

But back to my point, an engineered virus would not be so picky. It would be much more deadly, wiping out sick and healthy populations alike.

 

[EmuWarsVeteran]

As opposed to the hundreds which support the fact that Neanderthals and Denisovians contributed to the gene pool of those H. sapiens outside sub-Saharan Africa and developed civilization? Hmm.

There's more you dummy, this was just the first one to be published and as such the one that bothered explaining the most which is why I link it. You can go to pubmed and get the rest yourself, I just care about having the explanation for those who may want it.

 

[Shitassdeaddude]

Going to have to disagree with you there, when was the last time the ccp prioritized something over their economy?

Sure, their draconic containment methods and fudged numbers could be more about the economy than their pride but that still doesn't mean they engineered the virus.

 

[Feline Supremacist]

I doubt the US is behind this, what would be the point of this when they are already decisively winning the trade war?

Although how hilarious would it be if this was a stolen US/Canadian bioweapon that they were preemptively trying to make a vaccine for and accidentally released it in the process.

I lean toward this theory myself, China values loyalty to the CCP over competence and as everyone can see they aren't competent at all.

 

[Coleslaw]

Going to have to disagree with you there, when was the last time the ccp prioritized something over their economy?

They would take this country back to the stone age if that meant they could be the cheifs.