20 ms·

A Man Who Saw the Pandemic Coming

281 points by dnetesn 7y ago

keithnz 7y ago
from what I've seen, lots of people in many different countries saw it coming.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- whatshisface 7y ago
  The three major groups of saw it coming are the "saw it coming from China" which only the most rational and steady-minded people were able to achieve, the "saw it coming once it spread to Italy" people (I fell in to this group because I fell prey to the "China is a different planet" fallacy), and the group you have a chance of joining today, the "realized American hospitals were going to get overwhelmed after seeing it happen in two other countries" group.
  - steve_adams_86 7y ago
    You don't think precautions in North America are sufficient? I'm not totally clear on how much we're mirroring Italy right now. I'm hoping we're doing better to isolate and prevent, and we're less dense in population, but... I'm still worried.
    - StavrosK 7y ago
      Other countries (mine included) are in almost complete shutdown, with only super markets and pharmacies open. Any other place where people congregate (schools, night clubs, cinemas, cafeterias, restaurants) are closed. This is with fewer than 200 cases country-wide, and it's still probably not going to be enough. I think there's more the US should be doing.
      - officialjunk 7y ago
        if you look at graphs of net new cases per day, US is about 2 weeks behind Italy. The current measures are insufficient to prevent it getting as bad.
        noitsnot 7y ago
        That's if those stats are even relatively accurate. The testing kits are lacking to say the least and the qualifications to use them seem very unrealistic in preventing it from spreading.
      - smacktoward 7y ago
        A big part of the problem here in the US has been a complete lack of national leadership from Washington, which has left all the various states to come up with policies on what should and shouldn’t be closed on their own. The results are (predictably) all over the place.
      - xienze 7y ago
        All sporting events in the US have been suspended (read: effectively cancelled) or outright cancelled, multiple states are enacting bans on congregations larger than 100/200/etc. people, many colleges and public schools are going on 2-3 week breaks, tech employers are starting to roll out mandatory work from home policies, etc. This is about as extreme as its ever been in recent memory. > I think there’s more the US should be doing. If you want more to be done, then politicians need to be honest about what we’re dealing with. Everyone, and I’m not talking about just Trump here, has been giving a lot of wishy-washy “well it’s not really bad, but it kinda is, but not really, we just want to prevent the spread of disease is all” answers but the actions we’re seeing seem to imply that this is some super-virus that’s gonna wipe out 20% of the population. And maybe that’s the case, but if you want people to treat it that way, we need to hear that. All I’ve been hearing from foreign and domestic leaders is “this is basically a really nasty flu.” Well guess what, the flu is background noise to everyone. Yeah it kills people but it’s just not perceived as some massive ongoing threat. Meanwhile you’ve got entire countries locking themselves down like it’s 28 Days Later over this particular virus. But again, nothing but “eh nothing to worry about, just like, quarantine yourself for the next couple weeks” talk from our leaders, how is anyone supposed to take this seriously if no one will admit that this virus is “something different this time”?
    - whatshisface 7y ago
      The precautions that would be needed to prevent hospital overloads would be things like nearly shutting down cities. We are seeing some time-buying measures enacted by local governments (event cancellations for example) along with some from the Federal government (border closing). However these measures buy us at most a few days of replication time. Factors like average age and population density slow it down, but that only delays the wall-hitting.
    - GeekyBear 7y ago
      We don't have nearly enough isolated ICU beds or ventilators on hand if we take what happened in China and Italy as a warning. The sad thing to me is that there is at least one American company that still makes ventilators here in the states, but they reported that they haven't been asked to ramp up production. They even make a simplified and hardened version of a ventilator specifically aimed at meeting surge demand during a pandemic, so the engineering effort has already been done. http://www.alliedhpi.com/mcv.htm http://www.alliedhpi.com/mcv.htm
      - danieltillett 7y ago
        Why haven’t management of this company not gone into mass ramp up on their own? If anyone can see the need it would have to be them.
        frenchy 7y ago
        If I'd hazard a guess, it might be because someone still has to operate the ventilator, and hospitals are expecting a drop in healthcare workers (since you don't want a sick person treating patients).
        m4rtink 7y ago
        A couple things being done to help reduce pressure on medical personel here in Czech Republic: - elective surgeries being canceled, hospitals cleared as much as possible - medical students were ordered to stay in their residence area and are taking disaster medicine courses - teaching students are volunteering to take care of children of medical personel (as all schools are closed, someone needs to take care of childrens & students are free to do so)
        wwweston 7y ago
        Once you're infected, would it matter if a sick healthcare worker treated you? (Presumably uninfected patients with unrelated issues wouldn't want a sick healthcare worker, but that's not everyone.)
        7y ago
    - count_zero 7y ago
      The US is about 11 days behind Italy, with approximately the same growth rate (keeping in mind this is only counting confirmed cases). Compare the "Total Coronavirus Cases" charts: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
      - dnhz 7y ago
        But the question is whether the social distancing being implemented across the US will reduce the rate of growth. There’s been drastic action taken this past week.
        ookblah 7y ago
        I mean it's very state by state right now and in disarray. In NYC they've tried to ban public events and large gatherings; no public schools are being shut down and it's pretty much whatever each entity decides. It's a hard choice to make in a city like this, but I feel we are on the "not doing enough" side of things. I think for the US they are definitely trying to weigh the economic cost so that's just competing with the heath cost. I guess time will tell.
        dnhz 7y ago
        Different major cities are likely to experience different outcomes, by chance and by actions taken. Maybe we’ll hear of overwhelmed hospitals in some areas of the country. But I’m hopeful that the US has enacted social distancing measures at an earlier stage of the spread than did Italy.
        alwillis 7y ago
        Boston just canceled public school until the week of April 27. Based on what’s about to happen, the schools won’t be able to reopen, because it’ll be too dangerous.
        japhyr 7y ago
        I am not seeing much social distancing. People are talking about it, but I don't think people are really doing it. I see pictures of other countries where people are visibly standing 3-6 feet apart, everywhere. Here people are standing in groups in the supermarket telling jokes as they're stocking up, as if they're involved in a light-hearted roleplay of a pandemic.
  - danieltillett 7y ago
    Plenty of us saw this coming as soon as news came out of China - even me [0]. The problem was none of us were able to do anything about it, either on a social or individual level beyond stocking up on food and other essentials in January before the masses panicked. 0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22156140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22156140
    - blhack 7y ago
      It's been a very difficult, helpless feeling watching this all happen. A lot of people were watching from afar what occurred in Wuhan, then saw it spread to SK, Japan, and eventually Italy. When Disney and Starbucks shut down in China it was extremely concerning, and when FoxConn shut down it was terrifying. I've been telling my friends and family that they should be gathering extra food, medications, etc. if for no reason other than the coming supply chain disruptions. At first they laughed, but at this point they seem like they're actually mad at me, and in some senses blame me for the currently bare shelves in supermarkets. It sucks.
      - Lucadg 7y ago
        Same here. Tried to alert people in Italy. Laughed at me. Now mad at me. The human mind is indeed fascinating. Still if only one person was saved because of this, it was worth it.
      - danieltillett 7y ago
        The feeling I have is like being tied to the railway line and watching the train coming around the bend. Nobody has started to blame me for the situation, but plenty laughed at me at the time when I tried to warn them what is coming. They have stopped laughing.
        alwillis 7y ago
        Yes. I sometimes feel like the Sarah Conner character in Terminator 2, telling friends and family about judgement day and being derided.
        7y ago
  - bawolff 7y ago
    I think lots of people predicted it as a risk, especially after the original sars, which didn't turn into a massive thing but was still a wake up call. I mean, canada created an entire new agency for being prepared for a pandemic after the sars thing. Here's a WHO page from 2016 that specificly mentions coronavirus type diseases as a risk: https://web.archive.org/web/20161220180509/http://www.who.int/csr/research-and-development/list_of_pathogens/en/ https://web.archive.org/web/20161220180509/http://www.who.in...
  - lerchmo 7y ago
    Expected the US to have 100k tests per day in February and a coordinated response but watched in horror as we bungled the early days in every imaginable way.
- ramraj07 7y ago
  Sounds reductive. This person seems to be as good an expert you can ever get on zoonotic spillover events as you can ever get, and if you read the Q&A, you'll see that he clearly lays out what is probably going to happen and what should rather be happening in an ideal world. This is not some armchair philosopher spewing racist things about Asians eating random animals being the root of all evil, but a clearly objective look at what probably causes things like this.
- craftinator 7y ago
  Unfortunately, not many of them appear to be in the US government.
- frandroid 7y ago
  Amazing. Who else?
jv22222 7y ago
People are focusing on the "he saw it coming" aspect of the title. I would encourage folks to read the article with an open mind as the "he saw it coming" is not really the point of most of what is said here. This is is an expert who understands the realty of zoonotic spillover, and how it is going to become a more prevalent threat over time, and how to deal with that threat.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > People are focusing on the "he saw it coming" aspect of the title. Of course - because it's a silly title. Give an article a silly title, expect silly comments.
  - sn9 7y ago
    Only if you hold people to the standard of engaging with an article on the basis of its headline instead of its substance. We should hold everyone to a higher standard than that. (At the very least, if the headline isn't enough to get you to read the article, avoid commenting on it.)
- nick_kline 7y ago
  And he understands the word zoonotic, which I didn't before reading the article. Since no one ever reads the article, it means transmission of diseases from animals to humans. Non-human animals.
- vahidmd 7y ago
  Are you sure?
- vahidmd 7y ago
  Ideally we would all have our own stocks of essentials that we build up gradually over time during normal circumstances. Unfortunately this is both difficult for some people, and antithetical to the modern trend of urban minimalism.
cageface 7y ago
They came to a fairly solid conclusion that we’re looking at an elevation of spillover events two to three times more than what we saw 40 years earlier. That continues to increase, driven by the huge increase in the human population and our expansion into wildlife areas. The single biggest predictor of spillover events is land-use change—more land going to agriculture and more specifically to livestock production. It was avian influenza in the 2000s. What you saw with avian influenza was a direct consequence of how much poultry was being produced to feed people So meat eating is not only a big driver in climate change and antibiotic resistance but is also dramatically increasing the likelihood of these crossover pandemics. It's time for us to quit our toxic addiction to meat.
- rmdashrfstar 7y ago
  How does one do so without missing essential nutrients that are only found in meats, if we're requiring realistic quantities for daily consumption, and not an absurd volume of food. For instance, there are certain things you find in large quantities in meat or fish, where the non meat aubsistute would require completely unrealistic amounts to be consumed to receive anywhere near the same amount. If this could be concretely addressed, I think that'd convince a lot of people on the fence to switch.
  - prox 7y ago
    It’s totally possible and is half as hard as you think. Some concrete example, this is the diet of 6 time world F1 champion Lewis Hamilton: https://www.businessinsider.nl/lewis-hamilton-diet-everything-he-eats-and-drinks-2018-11?international=true&r=US https://www.businessinsider.nl/lewis-hamilton-diet-everythin... You do need to take care in having good diet, like taking care of protein intake, B12, omega-3. I personally prefer a flexitarian diet, where meat is rare, mostly vegetarian and vegan when I want to. Thing is, you don’t need meat every day, and just halving it makes a great difference already with minimum effect on your health.
  - dinglejungle 7y ago
    Being less vague about which nutrients you're talking about would be a good start.
sago 7y ago
It is very tempting to be drawn into these kind of articles. But they are always worth a little caution. Counting successful predictions post hoc is dangerous. If there had been no pandemic this year, but California had suffered from an overwhelming earthquake, this article would read "A Wo/Man Who Saw the Earthquake Coming." If a catastrophic series of diplomatic failures had led to a nuclear strike: "A Wo/Man Who Saw the Nuclear War Coming." 20 years ago there were plenty of "A Wo/Man Who Saw the Terror Attacks Coming." And I'm not suggesting these people are crazy or out there on the fringe. Experts working in an area might agree what a worst case situation is, but disagree whether it is likely. If we took every worst case scenario entirely seriously, we would do very little else. Learning from the past is important. But estimating the probability of things that have occurred is really difficult and counterintuitive.
- muzani 7y ago
  If someone saw it coming, and acted early, there would be no pandemic and the action would have been seen as an overreaction. There were at least two cases during the Cold War which could have caused nuclear war, but some people made the right call. The article is focused more on future viruses. A bad thing happened now which was preventable. We've got no nuclear plant meltdowns and no nuclear wars, because we applied security procedures learned from the past to the present. We have less killer quakes because buildings are built to withstand earthquakes now. Most of these things aren't totally expensive to fix. They're a chain of bad events and all you have to do is break the chain at the weakest point. The Spanish flu was so deadly because people tried to bury it with propaganda and no quarantine measures were in place. At least today, we've panicked and taken action early.
  - AmericanChopper 7y ago
    > If someone saw it coming, and acted early, there would be no pandemic and the action would have been seen as an overreaction Preparing for every crisis that could potentially eventuate would come at the opportunity cost of doing anything else at all.
    - 7y ago
Phenomenit 7y ago
I think the most important part in the article is that with the wave of populism and nationalism sweeping the world it's evident that this mindset is incapable of solving any real problem on any scale. Even if the virus goes away and the economy bounces back we've learned nothing and climate change and another wave of pandemics is upon us. It's clear that market capitalism isn't resilient or robust. Our engine must always run on red and sooner or later it's going to brake down.
- erpellan 7y ago
  A car has brakes. An engine breaks down. Apart from that I agree. We forgot the ‘enlightened’ self interest part of capitalism. My wealth means nothing if the planet has to die for me to get it.
  - Phenomenit 7y ago
    Yeah, I'm all for creating brakes and maintenance periods.
  - DagAgren 7y ago
    The "enlightened" part was never there. That was always just self-justification.
- throw_m239339 7y ago
  > I think the most important part in the article is that with the wave of populism and nationalism sweeping the world it's evident that this mindset is incapable of solving any real problem on any scale. Less globalism, less ability to freely travel == less risk to spread the virus from country to country. If anything, nationalism does the contrary of what you claim it does. In fact, by closing their border right now, countries are insuring that no foreign traveler is going to bring now CORONA cases to their country. If nobody could travel to and from China, the global pandemic would not have happened.
- thu2111 7y ago
  You're interpreting things through the prism of your pre-existing ideology. Someone else could see current world events as evidence of the exact opposite of everything you say here. Indeed one headline I saw lately was something like "the nation state is back"! For instance the fact that different countries are trying different tactics let's us compare between them to see what works best. Without nations we'd presumably have the same response everywhere, so we couldn't look to e.g. South Korea to learn anything. Singapore's previous experience in combating SARS wouldn't have gone anywhere because it wouldn't have reflected global priorities. As for your last paragraph, that's just bog standard Marxist catastrophism isn't it? He was claiming capitalism's inherent contradictions would cause global collapse in the mid 1800's but he was wrong. It's been a standard refrain for centuries but where did this outbreak start? A communist country, that oppressed the doctor who tried to raise the alarm. Not great evidence for your case.
tus88 7y ago
No more batfish soup for you!
tomerbd 7y ago
"Viruses live on a delicate balance, don’t they? They have to be able to thrive without killing their host. Right. The ones that kill off their host quickly will disappear. With the SARS virus, it’s no surprise that killing 10 percent of its host, it wasn’t able to establish itself as a pandemic virus on this planet."
- bryanrasmussen 7y ago
  a virus could kill 100% of its host, as long as it took a long time to do so while the host was still able to go around and infect others. I don't think the 10% virulence is the reason (or the only reason) that SARS didn't make it to pandemic scale, I think it was everyone working against it and succeeding that time, which of course had the result of people thinking "hah, see it wasn't a problem, all those eggheads overreacting" on edit: I think my main irritation is with the governments that did not put the proper preparation in the health systems (enough ICU preparation for example) for what was a foreseeable event.
  - TsomArp 7y ago
    If you kill 100% of your hosts, to which other host will you go? 100% means all.
    - bryanrasmussen 7y ago
      let's say you had a virus that was like a really low grade cold for two months, and then spiked up really suddenly and killed the host. You're right, after you kill that host you won't go anywhere but you will go lots of places that two months prior.
    - playing_colours 7y ago
      We have much more mobility and contacts with other people than in past, therefore it may be more efficient for viruses to evolve into having longer incubation period than becoming less lethal.
    - laumars 7y ago
Izkata 7y ago
> How did the current coronavirus pass from a bat to humans? > We don’t know specifically, but presumably the virus was being shed by the animal in the market, and humans were proximal. Or it could have been that people were directly handling the animal. There may have been a secondary source. In the 2002 SARS outbreak in China, we didn’t see people’s direct exposure to bats as the source of infection. There was a secondary source, a wildlife animal, the civet cat. Wuhan Center for Disease Control is ~900 feet from the market, and apparently studies bats. Has it been exonerated from suspicion that there was some sort of accident?
- caseysoftware 7y ago
  There's at least one study that disqualifies the market as the epicenter. I think the reason people want it to be the market is then it's obviously an accident or ignorance, not a malicious act. > 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). In the earliest case, the patient became ill on 1 December 2019 and had no reported link to the seafood market, the authors report. [snip] > Lucey says if the new data are accurate, the first human infections must have occurred in November 2019—if not earlier—because there is an incubation time between infection and symptoms surfacing. If so, the virus possibly spread silently between people in Wuhan—and perhaps elsewhere—before the cluster of cases from the city’s now-infamous Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was discovered in late December. Ref: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood-market-may-not-be-source-novel-virus-spreading-globally https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood-market...
  - Izkata 7y ago
    > There's at least one study that disqualifies the market as the epicenter. Yeah, that's basically what I'm asking. There's a seemingly-obvious candidate that's just right there, that I remember hearing of a month or so ago, that's not even offered as a possibility now.
- taneq 7y ago
  Early stories had all of the initial patients being staff at that centre, iirc. Although I thought recently they determined that the actual source was a pangolin?
thdrdt 7y ago
He is not the only one. I believe it was an Ask Me Anything with Bill Gates on Reddit. Someone asked Gates about a third world war and he replied he was more sure and worried about a pandemic. I have no doubt others in the field had the same thoughts. The most troubling thing is that a lot of leaders dismissed this information.
- corpMaverick 7y ago
  He warned us. We didn't listen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Af6b_wyiwI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Af6b_wyiwI
  - randomsearch 7y ago
    I think about a gazillion people identified exactly this type of situation as a problem, and we’ve had plenty of other outbreaks. It is completely unsurprising. The UK has done a lot of modelling and prepping for such an event, as I’m sure have other governments, but that doesn’t give you magic powers when it happens.
    - makomk 7y ago
      It's also worth bearing in mind that there's precisely one country which could possibly have done what he suggested and stopped this by preventing the spillover in the first place - China - and, well, good luck with that.
      - randomsearch 7y ago
        I think the problem is that the virus is so mild. You can't spot a lot of cases, so e.g. someone gets on a plane and is not showing symptoms and a few days later in Italy they get sick or infect others without realising they're ill.
  - jotm 7y ago
    And if this fizzles out people will just go "see? there was no need for these drastic measures, nothing happened!"... Nothing happened because drastic measures were taken...
onetimemanytime 7y ago
It's fair to say that a LOT of people saw it coming. Just in recent history we've dealt with Ebola, MERS, SARS so that they are viruses looking to become best buddies with us is not new, and it doesn't require a visionary to notice.
leto_ii 7y ago
> I’m stunned by the absolute absence of global dialogue for what is a global event. In Europe right now, you would never believe that there was a European Union. This is my key takeaway. A lot of the damage is in the end self-inflicted. People seem not to be able to act cohesively at an inter-national scale, not even within a country group that is supposedly designed for that. Whether it's pandemics, global warming or nuclear weapons this lack of cooperation shows up again and again.
- corpMaverick 7y ago
  Lack of leadership. That happens when the most powerful man in the world is an idiot that doesn't believe in multilateral cooperation.
  - leto_ii 7y ago
    Trump is part of the problem, for sure, but it seems to me that a world that is strongly divided into nation-states is just not able to effectively tackle pan-national threats. Even at an individual level we're so used to thinking in terms of 'our country vs. the rest' that our ability to empathize with people from 'far-away' is impeded.
    - bamboozled 7y ago
      I’ve literally heard this virus be called “foreign”, like it identifies with a nationality etc.
      - sorokod 7y ago
        Quote: "This is the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus in modern history"
    - buboard 7y ago
      OTOH it s increased international travel that causes the acuteness of these pandemics
    - 7y ago
thevirustracker 7y ago
You can track it at https://thevirustracker.com/ https://thevirustracker.com/ the fasest up to date tracker I have seen
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  Wow how did you find that? Did you just Google around until you found the latest one? The latest map I knew was this one, which is slightly behind but has zooming capability: https://hgis.uw.edu/virus/ https://hgis.uw.edu/virus/ Seems yours has exactly the same info as the most up to date source I knew that lacked a map: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
- klohto 7y ago
  Considering it’s yours, I have doubt it’s the “fasest” :)
blackrock 7y ago
I think the appearance of this virus, was only a matter of time. It’s not a question of if, but, when. The virus had existed in bats for millions of years, evolving and stabilizing itself symbiotically with the bat, and it took just the right combination, the right spark, to set off a chain of events that would allow it to eventually hunt down the human race.
peignoir 7y ago
Great interview until he talks about the slowly boiling frog analogy : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog it’s stupid but he lost his credibility for me there ...
- anoncow 7y ago
  I think he meant it metaphorically.
  - hencq 7y ago
    Obviously. He even calls it an old saw. That's a very strange reason to be put off from the article.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
DaniFong 7y ago
I started running at this full tilt on Jan 23rd, for the record. Making progress. The main problem was our information systems were taken over, but I fuxxed it pretty good I think. It was all about making the positive feedbacks.
pfdietz 7y ago
I wonder if the end result of informing people that wildlife is swimming in potentially deadly viruses would be the attitude that the wildlife should be exterminated, not preserved.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
WilsonPaige 7y ago
Covid-19 is no worse than SARS yet the panic is so much greater: - USA had 61,000 flu deaths in 2017-2018 from SARS but we've had only 1,600 deaths from Covid-19! - CDC does estimate we'll have 61,000 deaths from Covid-19 but are they simply grabbing the SARS death statistic and repeating it? In any case Covid-19 shows no evidence of being any worse than SARS. https://www.zerohedge.com/health/panic-pandemic-there-better-approach https://www.zerohedge.com/health/panic-pandemic-there-better...
zaat 7y ago
I submitted an article predicting Corona virus pandemic from 2013, but it wasn't upvoted: The Next Pandemic: Not if, but When: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22571607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22571607
- jimbobimbo 7y ago
  I recon it didn't receive attention, because it's a trite observation, not prediction. "It's not if, but when there will be another recession." "It's not if, but when there will be another pandemic." "It's not if, but when another asteroid hit the Earth." We live in the real world, things happen more than once.
  - zaat 7y ago
    Yes, that's the headline. But the article is specifically about Corona and quite detailed: > Coronaviruses are a genus of bugs that cause respiratory and gastrointestinal infections, sometimes mild and sometimes fierce, in humans, other mammals and birds. ... > Another reason is that coronaviruses as a group are very changeable, very protean, because of their high rates of mutation and their proclivity for recombination: when the viruses replicate, their genetic material is continually being inaccurately copied — and when two virus strains infect a single host cell, it is often intermixed. Such rich genetic variation gives them what one expert has called an “intrinsic evolvability,” a capacity to adapt quickly to new circumstances within new hosts. ... > Bats, though wondrous and necessary animals, do seem to be disproportionately implicated as reservoir hosts of new zoonotic viruses...
- casefields 7y ago
  I read The Coming Plague in the 90s: https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Plague-Emerging-Diseases-Balance/dp/0140250913/ https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Plague-Emerging-Diseases-Balan... These aren't hard predictions.
forkexec 7y ago
End all meat agriculture and urban sprawl globally, and the risks of developing novel pandemics would fall precipitously. They are the major sources and they are entirely deliberately chosen.
jokoon 7y ago
If china allows those wet markets again I hope there will be international efforts to sabotage those markets, and even have sanctions on china if they do nothing to fight against those practices. I've heard those farmers who breed those animals lobbied the chinese government to allow those farms. So in the end, they will not prevent those practices entirely. So it might happen again in a region where the government have less control. That's the scary part. It's eye-opening that unscientific beliefs are actually endangering lives. It was true for anti-vax, but now we have reached a stage when ignorance reached a new stage of dangerosity.
- illumin8 7y ago
  It's more than wet markets, although those are obviously dangerous. It's the continued expansion of human population into rainforests and other wildlife areas: > Yes. EcoHealth Alliance, an NGO, and others, looked at all reported outbreaks since 1940. They came to a fairly solid conclusion that we’re looking at an elevation of spillover events two to three times more than what we saw 40 years earlier. That continues to increase, driven by the huge increase in the human population and our expansion into wildlife areas. The single biggest predictor of spillover events is land-use change—more land going to agriculture and more specifically to livestock production. This is not going to be fixed easily. Everything from the deforestation of the Brazilian rainforest to Chinese population growth is driving it.

281 points by dnetesn 7y ago

keithnz 7y ago

from what I've seen, lots of people in many different countries saw it coming.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
whatshisface 7y ago
The three major groups of saw it coming are the "saw it coming from China" which only the most rational and steady-minded people were able to achieve, the "saw it coming once it spread to Italy" people (I fell in to this group because I fell prey to the "China is a different planet" fallacy), and the group you have a chance of joining today, the "realized American hospitals were going to get overwhelmed after seeing it happen in two other countries" group.
- steve_adams_86 7y ago
  You don't think precautions in North America are sufficient? I'm not totally clear on how much we're mirroring Italy right now. I'm hoping we're doing better to isolate and prevent, and we're less dense in population, but... I'm still worried.
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    Other countries (mine included) are in almost complete shutdown, with only super markets and pharmacies open. Any other place where people congregate (schools, night clubs, cinemas, cafeterias, restaurants) are closed. This is with fewer than 200 cases country-wide, and it's still probably not going to be enough. I think there's more the US should be doing.
    - officialjunk 7y ago
      if you look at graphs of net new cases per day, US is about 2 weeks behind Italy. The current measures are insufficient to prevent it getting as bad.
      - noitsnot 7y ago
        That's if those stats are even relatively accurate. The testing kits are lacking to say the least and the qualifications to use them seem very unrealistic in preventing it from spreading.
    - smacktoward 7y ago
      A big part of the problem here in the US has been a complete lack of national leadership from Washington, which has left all the various states to come up with policies on what should and shouldn’t be closed on their own. The results are (predictably) all over the place.
    - xienze 7y ago
      All sporting events in the US have been suspended (read: effectively cancelled) or outright cancelled, multiple states are enacting bans on congregations larger than 100/200/etc. people, many colleges and public schools are going on 2-3 week breaks, tech employers are starting to roll out mandatory work from home policies, etc. This is about as extreme as its ever been in recent memory. > I think there’s more the US should be doing. If you want more to be done, then politicians need to be honest about what we’re dealing with. Everyone, and I’m not talking about just Trump here, has been giving a lot of wishy-washy “well it’s not really bad, but it kinda is, but not really, we just want to prevent the spread of disease is all” answers but the actions we’re seeing seem to imply that this is some super-virus that’s gonna wipe out 20% of the population. And maybe that’s the case, but if you want people to treat it that way, we need to hear that. All I’ve been hearing from foreign and domestic leaders is “this is basically a really nasty flu.” Well guess what, the flu is background noise to everyone. Yeah it kills people but it’s just not perceived as some massive ongoing threat. Meanwhile you’ve got entire countries locking themselves down like it’s 28 Days Later over this particular virus. But again, nothing but “eh nothing to worry about, just like, quarantine yourself for the next couple weeks” talk from our leaders, how is anyone supposed to take this seriously if no one will admit that this virus is “something different this time”?
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    The precautions that would be needed to prevent hospital overloads would be things like nearly shutting down cities. We are seeing some time-buying measures enacted by local governments (event cancellations for example) along with some from the Federal government (border closing). However these measures buy us at most a few days of replication time. Factors like average age and population density slow it down, but that only delays the wall-hitting.
  - GeekyBear 7y ago
    We don't have nearly enough isolated ICU beds or ventilators on hand if we take what happened in China and Italy as a warning. The sad thing to me is that there is at least one American company that still makes ventilators here in the states, but they reported that they haven't been asked to ramp up production. They even make a simplified and hardened version of a ventilator specifically aimed at meeting surge demand during a pandemic, so the engineering effort has already been done. http://www.alliedhpi.com/mcv.htm http://www.alliedhpi.com/mcv.htm
    - danieltillett 7y ago
      Why haven’t management of this company not gone into mass ramp up on their own? If anyone can see the need it would have to be them.
      - frenchy 7y ago
        If I'd hazard a guess, it might be because someone still has to operate the ventilator, and hospitals are expecting a drop in healthcare workers (since you don't want a sick person treating patients).
        m4rtink 7y ago
        A couple things being done to help reduce pressure on medical personel here in Czech Republic: - elective surgeries being canceled, hospitals cleared as much as possible - medical students were ordered to stay in their residence area and are taking disaster medicine courses - teaching students are volunteering to take care of children of medical personel (as all schools are closed, someone needs to take care of childrens & students are free to do so)
        wwweston 7y ago
        Once you're infected, would it matter if a sick healthcare worker treated you? (Presumably uninfected patients with unrelated issues wouldn't want a sick healthcare worker, but that's not everyone.)
      - 7y ago
  - count_zero 7y ago
    The US is about 11 days behind Italy, with approximately the same growth rate (keeping in mind this is only counting confirmed cases). Compare the "Total Coronavirus Cases" charts: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
    - dnhz 7y ago
      But the question is whether the social distancing being implemented across the US will reduce the rate of growth. There’s been drastic action taken this past week.
      - ookblah 7y ago
        I mean it's very state by state right now and in disarray. In NYC they've tried to ban public events and large gatherings; no public schools are being shut down and it's pretty much whatever each entity decides. It's a hard choice to make in a city like this, but I feel we are on the "not doing enough" side of things. I think for the US they are definitely trying to weigh the economic cost so that's just competing with the heath cost. I guess time will tell.
        dnhz 7y ago
        Different major cities are likely to experience different outcomes, by chance and by actions taken. Maybe we’ll hear of overwhelmed hospitals in some areas of the country. But I’m hopeful that the US has enacted social distancing measures at an earlier stage of the spread than did Italy.
        alwillis 7y ago
        Boston just canceled public school until the week of April 27. Based on what’s about to happen, the schools won’t be able to reopen, because it’ll be too dangerous.
      - japhyr 7y ago
        I am not seeing much social distancing. People are talking about it, but I don't think people are really doing it. I see pictures of other countries where people are visibly standing 3-6 feet apart, everywhere. Here people are standing in groups in the supermarket telling jokes as they're stocking up, as if they're involved in a light-hearted roleplay of a pandemic.
- danieltillett 7y ago
  Plenty of us saw this coming as soon as news came out of China - even me [0]. The problem was none of us were able to do anything about it, either on a social or individual level beyond stocking up on food and other essentials in January before the masses panicked. 0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22156140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22156140
  - blhack 7y ago
    It's been a very difficult, helpless feeling watching this all happen. A lot of people were watching from afar what occurred in Wuhan, then saw it spread to SK, Japan, and eventually Italy. When Disney and Starbucks shut down in China it was extremely concerning, and when FoxConn shut down it was terrifying. I've been telling my friends and family that they should be gathering extra food, medications, etc. if for no reason other than the coming supply chain disruptions. At first they laughed, but at this point they seem like they're actually mad at me, and in some senses blame me for the currently bare shelves in supermarkets. It sucks.
    - Lucadg 7y ago
      Same here. Tried to alert people in Italy. Laughed at me. Now mad at me. The human mind is indeed fascinating. Still if only one person was saved because of this, it was worth it.
    - danieltillett 7y ago
      The feeling I have is like being tied to the railway line and watching the train coming around the bend. Nobody has started to blame me for the situation, but plenty laughed at me at the time when I tried to warn them what is coming. They have stopped laughing.
      - alwillis 7y ago
        Yes. I sometimes feel like the Sarah Conner character in Terminator 2, telling friends and family about judgement day and being derided.
      - 7y ago
- bawolff 7y ago
  I think lots of people predicted it as a risk, especially after the original sars, which didn't turn into a massive thing but was still a wake up call. I mean, canada created an entire new agency for being prepared for a pandemic after the sars thing. Here's a WHO page from 2016 that specificly mentions coronavirus type diseases as a risk: https://web.archive.org/web/20161220180509/http://www.who.int/csr/research-and-development/list_of_pathogens/en/ https://web.archive.org/web/20161220180509/http://www.who.in...
- lerchmo 7y ago
  Expected the US to have 100k tests per day in February and a coordinated response but watched in horror as we bungled the early days in every imaginable way.
ramraj07 7y ago
Sounds reductive. This person seems to be as good an expert you can ever get on zoonotic spillover events as you can ever get, and if you read the Q&A, you'll see that he clearly lays out what is probably going to happen and what should rather be happening in an ideal world. This is not some armchair philosopher spewing racist things about Asians eating random animals being the root of all evil, but a clearly objective look at what probably causes things like this.
craftinator 7y ago
Unfortunately, not many of them appear to be in the US government.
frandroid 7y ago
Amazing. Who else?

jv22222 7y ago

People are focusing on the "he saw it coming" aspect of the title. I would encourage folks to read the article with an open mind as the "he saw it coming" is not really the point of most of what is said here. This is is an expert who understands the realty of zoonotic spillover, and how it is going to become a more prevalent threat over time, and how to deal with that threat.

chrisseaton 7y ago
> People are focusing on the "he saw it coming" aspect of the title. Of course - because it's a silly title. Give an article a silly title, expect silly comments.
- sn9 7y ago
  Only if you hold people to the standard of engaging with an article on the basis of its headline instead of its substance. We should hold everyone to a higher standard than that. (At the very least, if the headline isn't enough to get you to read the article, avoid commenting on it.)
nick_kline 7y ago
And he understands the word zoonotic, which I didn't before reading the article. Since no one ever reads the article, it means transmission of diseases from animals to humans. Non-human animals.
vahidmd 7y ago
Are you sure?
vahidmd 7y ago
Ideally we would all have our own stocks of essentials that we build up gradually over time during normal circumstances. Unfortunately this is both difficult for some people, and antithetical to the modern trend of urban minimalism.

cageface 7y ago

They came to a fairly solid conclusion that we’re looking at an elevation of spillover events two to three times more than what we saw 40 years earlier. That continues to increase, driven by the huge increase in the human population and our expansion into wildlife areas. The single biggest predictor of spillover events is land-use change—more land going to agriculture and more specifically to livestock production. It was avian influenza in the 2000s. What you saw with avian influenza was a direct consequence of how much poultry was being produced to feed people So meat eating is not only a big driver in climate change and antibiotic resistance but is also dramatically increasing the likelihood of these crossover pandemics. It's time for us to quit our toxic addiction to meat.

rmdashrfstar 7y ago
How does one do so without missing essential nutrients that are only found in meats, if we're requiring realistic quantities for daily consumption, and not an absurd volume of food. For instance, there are certain things you find in large quantities in meat or fish, where the non meat aubsistute would require completely unrealistic amounts to be consumed to receive anywhere near the same amount. If this could be concretely addressed, I think that'd convince a lot of people on the fence to switch.
- prox 7y ago
  It’s totally possible and is half as hard as you think. Some concrete example, this is the diet of 6 time world F1 champion Lewis Hamilton: https://www.businessinsider.nl/lewis-hamilton-diet-everything-he-eats-and-drinks-2018-11?international=true&r=US https://www.businessinsider.nl/lewis-hamilton-diet-everythin... You do need to take care in having good diet, like taking care of protein intake, B12, omega-3. I personally prefer a flexitarian diet, where meat is rare, mostly vegetarian and vegan when I want to. Thing is, you don’t need meat every day, and just halving it makes a great difference already with minimum effect on your health.
- dinglejungle 7y ago
  Being less vague about which nutrients you're talking about would be a good start.

sago 7y ago

It is very tempting to be drawn into these kind of articles. But they are always worth a little caution. Counting successful predictions post hoc is dangerous. If there had been no pandemic this year, but California had suffered from an overwhelming earthquake, this article would read "A Wo/Man Who Saw the Earthquake Coming." If a catastrophic series of diplomatic failures had led to a nuclear strike: "A Wo/Man Who Saw the Nuclear War Coming." 20 years ago there were plenty of "A Wo/Man Who Saw the Terror Attacks Coming." And I'm not suggesting these people are crazy or out there on the fringe. Experts working in an area might agree what a worst case situation is, but disagree whether it is likely. If we took every worst case scenario entirely seriously, we would do very little else. Learning from the past is important. But estimating the probability of things that have occurred is really difficult and counterintuitive.

muzani 7y ago
If someone saw it coming, and acted early, there would be no pandemic and the action would have been seen as an overreaction. There were at least two cases during the Cold War which could have caused nuclear war, but some people made the right call. The article is focused more on future viruses. A bad thing happened now which was preventable. We've got no nuclear plant meltdowns and no nuclear wars, because we applied security procedures learned from the past to the present. We have less killer quakes because buildings are built to withstand earthquakes now. Most of these things aren't totally expensive to fix. They're a chain of bad events and all you have to do is break the chain at the weakest point. The Spanish flu was so deadly because people tried to bury it with propaganda and no quarantine measures were in place. At least today, we've panicked and taken action early.
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  > If someone saw it coming, and acted early, there would be no pandemic and the action would have been seen as an overreaction Preparing for every crisis that could potentially eventuate would come at the opportunity cost of doing anything else at all.
  - 7y ago

Phenomenit 7y ago

I think the most important part in the article is that with the wave of populism and nationalism sweeping the world it's evident that this mindset is incapable of solving any real problem on any scale. Even if the virus goes away and the economy bounces back we've learned nothing and climate change and another wave of pandemics is upon us. It's clear that market capitalism isn't resilient or robust. Our engine must always run on red and sooner or later it's going to brake down.

erpellan 7y ago
A car has brakes. An engine breaks down. Apart from that I agree. We forgot the ‘enlightened’ self interest part of capitalism. My wealth means nothing if the planet has to die for me to get it.
- Phenomenit 7y ago
  Yeah, I'm all for creating brakes and maintenance periods.
- DagAgren 7y ago
  The "enlightened" part was never there. That was always just self-justification.
throw_m239339 7y ago
> I think the most important part in the article is that with the wave of populism and nationalism sweeping the world it's evident that this mindset is incapable of solving any real problem on any scale. Less globalism, less ability to freely travel == less risk to spread the virus from country to country. If anything, nationalism does the contrary of what you claim it does. In fact, by closing their border right now, countries are insuring that no foreign traveler is going to bring now CORONA cases to their country. If nobody could travel to and from China, the global pandemic would not have happened.
thu2111 7y ago
You're interpreting things through the prism of your pre-existing ideology. Someone else could see current world events as evidence of the exact opposite of everything you say here. Indeed one headline I saw lately was something like "the nation state is back"! For instance the fact that different countries are trying different tactics let's us compare between them to see what works best. Without nations we'd presumably have the same response everywhere, so we couldn't look to e.g. South Korea to learn anything. Singapore's previous experience in combating SARS wouldn't have gone anywhere because it wouldn't have reflected global priorities. As for your last paragraph, that's just bog standard Marxist catastrophism isn't it? He was claiming capitalism's inherent contradictions would cause global collapse in the mid 1800's but he was wrong. It's been a standard refrain for centuries but where did this outbreak start? A communist country, that oppressed the doctor who tried to raise the alarm. Not great evidence for your case.

tus88 7y ago

No more batfish soup for you!

tomerbd 7y ago

"Viruses live on a delicate balance, don’t they? They have to be able to thrive without killing their host. Right. The ones that kill off their host quickly will disappear. With the SARS virus, it’s no surprise that killing 10 percent of its host, it wasn’t able to establish itself as a pandemic virus on this planet."

bryanrasmussen 7y ago
a virus could kill 100% of its host, as long as it took a long time to do so while the host was still able to go around and infect others. I don't think the 10% virulence is the reason (or the only reason) that SARS didn't make it to pandemic scale, I think it was everyone working against it and succeeding that time, which of course had the result of people thinking "hah, see it wasn't a problem, all those eggheads overreacting" on edit: I think my main irritation is with the governments that did not put the proper preparation in the health systems (enough ICU preparation for example) for what was a foreseeable event.
- TsomArp 7y ago
  If you kill 100% of your hosts, to which other host will you go? 100% means all.
  - bryanrasmussen 7y ago
    let's say you had a virus that was like a really low grade cold for two months, and then spiked up really suddenly and killed the host. You're right, after you kill that host you won't go anywhere but you will go lots of places that two months prior.
  - playing_colours 7y ago
    We have much more mobility and contacts with other people than in past, therefore it may be more efficient for viruses to evolve into having longer incubation period than becoming less lethal.
  - laumars 7y ago

Izkata 7y ago

> How did the current coronavirus pass from a bat to humans? > We don’t know specifically, but presumably the virus was being shed by the animal in the market, and humans were proximal. Or it could have been that people were directly handling the animal. There may have been a secondary source. In the 2002 SARS outbreak in China, we didn’t see people’s direct exposure to bats as the source of infection. There was a secondary source, a wildlife animal, the civet cat. Wuhan Center for Disease Control is ~900 feet from the market, and apparently studies bats. Has it been exonerated from suspicion that there was some sort of accident?

caseysoftware 7y ago
There's at least one study that disqualifies the market as the epicenter. I think the reason people want it to be the market is then it's obviously an accident or ignorance, not a malicious act. > 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). In the earliest case, the patient became ill on 1 December 2019 and had no reported link to the seafood market, the authors report. [snip] > Lucey says if the new data are accurate, the first human infections must have occurred in November 2019—if not earlier—because there is an incubation time between infection and symptoms surfacing. If so, the virus possibly spread silently between people in Wuhan—and perhaps elsewhere—before the cluster of cases from the city’s now-infamous Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was discovered in late December. Ref: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood-market-may-not-be-source-novel-virus-spreading-globally https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood-market...
- Izkata 7y ago
  > There's at least one study that disqualifies the market as the epicenter. Yeah, that's basically what I'm asking. There's a seemingly-obvious candidate that's just right there, that I remember hearing of a month or so ago, that's not even offered as a possibility now.
taneq 7y ago
Early stories had all of the initial patients being staff at that centre, iirc. Although I thought recently they determined that the actual source was a pangolin?

thdrdt 7y ago

He is not the only one. I believe it was an Ask Me Anything with Bill Gates on Reddit. Someone asked Gates about a third world war and he replied he was more sure and worried about a pandemic. I have no doubt others in the field had the same thoughts. The most troubling thing is that a lot of leaders dismissed this information.

corpMaverick 7y ago
He warned us. We didn't listen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Af6b_wyiwI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Af6b_wyiwI
- randomsearch 7y ago
  I think about a gazillion people identified exactly this type of situation as a problem, and we’ve had plenty of other outbreaks. It is completely unsurprising. The UK has done a lot of modelling and prepping for such an event, as I’m sure have other governments, but that doesn’t give you magic powers when it happens.
  - makomk 7y ago
    It's also worth bearing in mind that there's precisely one country which could possibly have done what he suggested and stopped this by preventing the spillover in the first place - China - and, well, good luck with that.
    - randomsearch 7y ago
      I think the problem is that the virus is so mild. You can't spot a lot of cases, so e.g. someone gets on a plane and is not showing symptoms and a few days later in Italy they get sick or infect others without realising they're ill.
- jotm 7y ago
  And if this fizzles out people will just go "see? there was no need for these drastic measures, nothing happened!"... Nothing happened because drastic measures were taken...

onetimemanytime 7y ago

It's fair to say that a LOT of people saw it coming. Just in recent history we've dealt with Ebola, MERS, SARS so that they are viruses looking to become best buddies with us is not new, and it doesn't require a visionary to notice.

leto_ii 7y ago

> I’m stunned by the absolute absence of global dialogue for what is a global event. In Europe right now, you would never believe that there was a European Union. This is my key takeaway. A lot of the damage is in the end self-inflicted. People seem not to be able to act cohesively at an inter-national scale, not even within a country group that is supposedly designed for that. Whether it's pandemics, global warming or nuclear weapons this lack of cooperation shows up again and again.

corpMaverick 7y ago
Lack of leadership. That happens when the most powerful man in the world is an idiot that doesn't believe in multilateral cooperation.
- leto_ii 7y ago
  Trump is part of the problem, for sure, but it seems to me that a world that is strongly divided into nation-states is just not able to effectively tackle pan-national threats. Even at an individual level we're so used to thinking in terms of 'our country vs. the rest' that our ability to empathize with people from 'far-away' is impeded.
  - bamboozled 7y ago
    I’ve literally heard this virus be called “foreign”, like it identifies with a nationality etc.
    - sorokod 7y ago
      Quote: "This is the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus in modern history"
  - buboard 7y ago
    OTOH it s increased international travel that causes the acuteness of these pandemics
  - 7y ago

thevirustracker 7y ago

You can track it at https://thevirustracker.com/ https://thevirustracker.com/ the fasest up to date tracker I have seen

mehrdadn 7y ago
Wow how did you find that? Did you just Google around until you found the latest one? The latest map I knew was this one, which is slightly behind but has zooming capability: https://hgis.uw.edu/virus/ https://hgis.uw.edu/virus/ Seems yours has exactly the same info as the most up to date source I knew that lacked a map: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
klohto 7y ago
Considering it’s yours, I have doubt it’s the “fasest” :)

blackrock 7y ago

I think the appearance of this virus, was only a matter of time. It’s not a question of if, but, when. The virus had existed in bats for millions of years, evolving and stabilizing itself symbiotically with the bat, and it took just the right combination, the right spark, to set off a chain of events that would allow it to eventually hunt down the human race.

peignoir 7y ago

Great interview until he talks about the slowly boiling frog analogy : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog it’s stupid but he lost his credibility for me there ...

anoncow 7y ago
I think he meant it metaphorically.
- hencq 7y ago
  Obviously. He even calls it an old saw. That's a very strange reason to be put off from the article.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

DaniFong 7y ago

I started running at this full tilt on Jan 23rd, for the record. Making progress. The main problem was our information systems were taken over, but I fuxxed it pretty good I think. It was all about making the positive feedbacks.

pfdietz 7y ago

I wonder if the end result of informing people that wildlife is swimming in potentially deadly viruses would be the attitude that the wildlife should be exterminated, not preserved.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

WilsonPaige 7y ago

Covid-19 is no worse than SARS yet the panic is so much greater: - USA had 61,000 flu deaths in 2017-2018 from SARS but we've had only 1,600 deaths from Covid-19! - CDC does estimate we'll have 61,000 deaths from Covid-19 but are they simply grabbing the SARS death statistic and repeating it? In any case Covid-19 shows no evidence of being any worse than SARS. https://www.zerohedge.com/health/panic-pandemic-there-better-approach https://www.zerohedge.com/health/panic-pandemic-there-better...

zaat 7y ago

I submitted an article predicting Corona virus pandemic from 2013, but it wasn't upvoted: The Next Pandemic: Not if, but When: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22571607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22571607

jimbobimbo 7y ago
I recon it didn't receive attention, because it's a trite observation, not prediction. "It's not if, but when there will be another recession." "It's not if, but when there will be another pandemic." "It's not if, but when another asteroid hit the Earth." We live in the real world, things happen more than once.
- zaat 7y ago
  Yes, that's the headline. But the article is specifically about Corona and quite detailed: > Coronaviruses are a genus of bugs that cause respiratory and gastrointestinal infections, sometimes mild and sometimes fierce, in humans, other mammals and birds. ... > Another reason is that coronaviruses as a group are very changeable, very protean, because of their high rates of mutation and their proclivity for recombination: when the viruses replicate, their genetic material is continually being inaccurately copied — and when two virus strains infect a single host cell, it is often intermixed. Such rich genetic variation gives them what one expert has called an “intrinsic evolvability,” a capacity to adapt quickly to new circumstances within new hosts. ... > Bats, though wondrous and necessary animals, do seem to be disproportionately implicated as reservoir hosts of new zoonotic viruses...
casefields 7y ago
I read The Coming Plague in the 90s: https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Plague-Emerging-Diseases-Balance/dp/0140250913/ https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Plague-Emerging-Diseases-Balan... These aren't hard predictions.

forkexec 7y ago

End all meat agriculture and urban sprawl globally, and the risks of developing novel pandemics would fall precipitously. They are the major sources and they are entirely deliberately chosen.

jokoon 7y ago

If china allows those wet markets again I hope there will be international efforts to sabotage those markets, and even have sanctions on china if they do nothing to fight against those practices. I've heard those farmers who breed those animals lobbied the chinese government to allow those farms. So in the end, they will not prevent those practices entirely. So it might happen again in a region where the government have less control. That's the scary part. It's eye-opening that unscientific beliefs are actually endangering lives. It was true for anti-vax, but now we have reached a stage when ignorance reached a new stage of dangerosity.

illumin8 7y ago
It's more than wet markets, although those are obviously dangerous. It's the continued expansion of human population into rainforests and other wildlife areas: > Yes. EcoHealth Alliance, an NGO, and others, looked at all reported outbreaks since 1940. They came to a fairly solid conclusion that we’re looking at an elevation of spillover events two to three times more than what we saw 40 years earlier. That continues to increase, driven by the huge increase in the human population and our expansion into wildlife areas. The single biggest predictor of spillover events is land-use change—more land going to agriculture and more specifically to livestock production. This is not going to be fixed easily. Everything from the deforestation of the Brazilian rainforest to Chinese population growth is driving it.