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In 2008 we had to bail out the banks, otherwise everything would have gone under. Indeed, I believe that a defining moment of the GW Bush presidency was when he

In 2008 we had to bail out the banks, otherwise everything would have gone under. Indeed, I believe that a defining moment of the GW Bush presidency was when he told the head of the Federal Reserve (I think?) to do whatever was necessary, with GWB providing political cover, and thus 'saved the world'. Where we screwed up was in not bringing to account (i.e. prison) many of the people responsible for letting things get as far as they did. We also used monetary policy too much when fiscal policy (i.e. bailing out Main Street) would have been better. My understanding is that it took a while before the (natural) emergence of SARS and MERS was understood, and so for COVID most probably.

tripletao 4y ago
> My understanding is that it took a while before the (natural) emergence of SARS and MERS was understood, and so for COVID most probably. The proximal host is the animal that transmitted the virus to humans. That host was identified for SARS-1 (civet cats) and MERS (camels) within about a year. For example, here's an article from 2003: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1140695/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1140695/ The reservoir host is the animal in which most of the virus's genome evolved. That host (bats for both) took much longer to identify, through Dr. Shi's work at the WIV. Since SARS-CoV-2 is very similar to SARS-1, we knew its reservoir host (bats) as soon as it was sequenced. We still don't know its proximal host. The proximal host is the critical question in establishing natural zoonotic origin--no one disputes that SARS-CoV-2 evolved mostly in bats, just whether its path into humans involved a research accident.