3 ms·

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 (b

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.

mc32 7y ago
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).
- dirtyid 7y ago
  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.

mc32 7y ago

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).

dirtyid 7y ago
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.