BNONews has been making a dashboard for every maybe-virus the past year (recently they had Monkeypox and some other one, Marburg maybe)? None of those turned into any major problem. They're pandemic profiteering, so while I appreciate the data they're collecting, I'm not quite ready to start freaking out about it.
Monkeypox was(/is? Idk) not a non-event, it was very real and relevant professionals were concerned about it. I don't know where 'BNONews' is based, but since China's in the title of this one I'll point out there were 'monkeypox' cases in the UK too for example.
Just because it fortunately didn't go (/hasn't gone!) like SARS-nCoV-2019 doesn't mean it wasn't worth reporting.
Monkeypox was pretty clearly a non-event for the vast majority of the population pretty early on. There continued to be misleading and fearmongering reporting for weeks and months after that was obvious, because of the well-known phenomenon where media gets more clicks and eyeballs if the "news" is bad. Also, Covid doomers really wanted a 2nd thing to be depressed about.
It remained a non-event for the vast majority of the population because the most vulnerable proportion of the population participated in a widespread vaccination campaign. If a little extra screen time in the media made that campaign successful it paid dividends for public health, imo.
Because the messaging was so muddled by attempts to amplify fear[1][2] or to avoid stigma, straight people showed up to vaccination sites and took very limited Monkeypox vaccine capacity from the sub-population who was actually at risk. At the time, I read opinions[3] from gay men who would have really preferred that the messaging was more explicit about who was at risk (so that gay men knew to get vaccinated and straight people knew they weren't at much risk).
I'm heterosexual and I checked the quantities locally they were always bountiful before I went for my shots.
It doesn't seem like there was any effort to rebalance the amounts, seems more like a bureaucratic issue that had nothing to do with me. Once a municipality got their allocation, that was that.
the most vulnerable proportion of the population participated in a widespread vaccination campaign
It looks like about 425k men were fully vaccinated, and another 250k got a single vaccine. That's not amazing compliance if you assume the vulnerable population is somewhere in the 3-16 million range.
> That's not amazing compliance if you assume the vulnerable population is somewhere in the 3-16 million range.
The subset of gay men having unprotected sex with many partners is significantly smaller than the total population of gay men (about 7 million in the US).
I wouldn't call Monkeypox a maybe virus, especially along with these. Its spread was mostly limited to a single community (sexually active gay men), and it absolutely would have spread out of control had there not been a very strong vaccination campaign with high rates of compliance. Within that community, there were many people who were impacted and many others who changed their behavior to help mitigate to spread.
Why do these viruses often appear in China first? Has there been any study to find out any common patterns? Is it the food? Culture? Living environment?
One possible reason for delayed virus detection in the West is our sluggish response to identifying new strains (in some of our largest countries, not all). But I think the emergence and spread of serious viral infections is largely influenced by population density, rather than geographical location. And the population density in China has gone up a lot in about the last decade, making more serious transmissible diseases come out of China recently.
When Covid's first wave saw exponential infection growth, statistics and graphs demonstrated striking similarities among urban areas worldwide. In contrast, rural regions consistently exhibited lower infection rates throughout the pandemic.
To illustrate this with a personal anecdote, I know someone who lives in a tiny village on a ranch (population: ~30), and they have reported seeing zero Covid cases, having interacted with around 50 other people over the last four years. I think this underscores the role of population density in virus transmission.
People in China also interact more closely with animals, and with a wider variety, than in the West. The West does not have any wet markets or nor the wide variety of species available for consumption. This helps in the virus jumping species. Once it jumps, the population density helps it spread.
Once or twice, although it wasn't a major sort of fair. There were a lot of animals, and now that I think about it, quite a wide variety of chickens. But it's only a few weeks out of the year, and in summer. And not very much blood. (Don't know if blood makes a difference in this case, though) I'm still a little shocked by the (large) fish gills I saw hanging up on a wall in a market in Hong Kong some years ago, looked like it was still breathing.
When I visited South China, everything was crowded. Sick building syndrome is probably more common due to the common use of AC and large shopping malls people hang out at as well as recirculating air. My friend in India said that she did not get constant electricity in Gujarat so AC wasn't as common everywhere.
China is much more urbanized, India's population is still majority rural. And China also has a more robust public health system, which means that more cases get detected in the first place.
The viral jump from animals to humans is a common mechanism in many of the worst pandemics, with covid-19 and hiv being prime recent examples. There's some evidence "the spanish flu" of 1918 came from swine.
If I were working on the problem "how can we reduce the frequency new very dangerous viruses are introduced" I would pay attention to this aspect.
The solution to this problem is the same as nearly every other problem humans create: stop destroying ecosystems and animal habitats, stop expansion, reduce meat eating, etc. These things increase the transmission of zoonotic diseases. There was a really good article in 2020 that I can now not find where an expert discussed how these things are not new, COVID was not a surprise, and that these transmissions will do nothing but increase in frequency if we don't systematically tackle these problems.
I thought the most likely origin of Covid-19 is a lab leak (at least according to the latest from the DOE and the FBI), likely from gain-of-function research gone wrong?
No – even that DOE report gave it a low probability ranking. It’s perfect for conspiracy mongers because you can’t completely rule out the possibility but the evidence has pretty consistently pointed at a non-lab jump, possibly in the wet market, and that’s not surprising since it’s a common scenario scientists have been warning about for decades.
> even that DOE report gave it a low probability ranking
Well, specifically, they assessed with "low confidence" that the "most likely" source was a lab leak. Meaning they think the wet market theory is less likely, though also with low confidence.
I do note in the analysis you linked that the authors admit to unusual circumstances around the data they used, and that the source of the data is the Chinese CDC. Given the obvious incentive on the part of the Chinese government to disclaim a lab leak, I'm hesitant to take this as conclusive evidence.
The problem is, I'm not sure you can trust any news out of china to be the 100% unvarnished truth anymore. Seems the only way you hear any bad news out of china is when it gets 'too big to hide'.
And you'd trust the news out of ... where, exactly?
I think it's pretty clear from the last decade that the major journalism providers in the US (for example) are also corrupt, and that's true of every country I've experienced.
Which is not to say that everywhere suffers this problem to the same degree, but just that the notion of a "trusted source of news" is demonstrably naive.
Nah, that’s a false equivalency because you’re equating “some corruption exists” like in the US to ~99% corruption as it exists in China w.r.t how it seems you are defining corruption in the mainstream press.
Because unlike China there exists enough of a free press, from institutions down to individual bloggers and professors, who can jump on the Internet and write almost anything without repercussion and if they write something very good or very important it’ll be spread.
I think you're both over-estimating the situation in the US, and under-estimating the situation in China, but you're right: there's a difference.
My point is that _trusting_ news organizations is dumb. None is trustworthy. Whether their coverage is manufactured/absent/biased because it's required by the government, required by the owners, required by the editor, required by the organizational culture, or even a side-effect of their workload, nothing is trustworthy.
I'm not sure there was ever a time that the press could be trusted, but it absolutely cannot be trusted now.
Personally I don’t find “trust nothing” to be very useful or practical. My local TV news reported that the Ohio Senate introduced a bill to do X and they reported that an estimated 26 people died the other day due to a tornado or series of tornadoes in Mississippi. I’m supposed to not trust that reporting?
I read that before replying. That was the type cope that come attached to these sorts of distracting replies to redirect attention to the amateur leagues while the NBA tier players run rampant.
Are there any variants that can spread from birds to humans but not from humans to humans? Definitely not an expert in this at all, but it seems like the virus wouldn't care where it was before it got in to someone's mucous membranes. I can certainly imagine some modes of transfer will be less likely because maybe this variant causes chickens to sneeze, but not people, greatly reducing transmissivity, but seems unlikely to me to be impossible.
Most bird flu in the past only spreads from birds to humans, or is like MERS in that it can technically spread human to human but with an R0 far less than 1.
Depends on which membranes. I think I remember reading that the reason these can transfer bird-to-human but not human-to-human is that they can only infect us if it gets so deep into the lungs we can't actually expel it from breathing or coughing.
"Although the virus has caused severe illness in some patients, Chinese authorities say there's no evidence so far that the disease can be passed through human contact."
We don't catch bird flu from eating infected birds, we catch it from being exposed to live birds who are sick (or to their droppings, as I understand it).
You would need to obtain a sufficient viral load in order to be infected. One or two copies won't do the job, you'd need to ingest infected material in some manner. Eye splash, breathe dust from cleaning a chicken house, or vicsera that harbor many copies of the virus. This is why we throw the guts out of most things before we continue preparation.
The position known since the Kama Sutra as the Aztec Sacrifice. However, in the next edition it will be renamed the "Praying Mantis" in order to be less offensive.
In case anyone is curious, it appears the location in question had three months of "stay at home", over a year of other restrictions (including school closures), 625 days of broad mask requirements, and so forth. In fact, some mask requirements are still in effect today.
Eh, put it on the tab. Millennials have never known stability anyways, they'd probably get uncomfortable if their lives stopped staggering from one externally-imposed crisis to another.
I used to live in Brisbane which had two "one in 100 year" floods in relatively quick succession: 2011 and 2022. When the second one came there was some talk about communicating the risk more effectively. Instead of saying "one in 100 year" it would be better to say there is like, a 0.2% chance of major flooding every year.
In what sense is 'one in 100 year' equivalent to '0.2% every year'? With the latter you'd expect 0.2 of them in 100 years?
(Totally agree the phrasing is misleading to the layman though, which is really the only reason for it to exist anyway, in an attempt to be more relatable.)
Not likely. The 60’s had riots, Vietnam, political assassinations, Cuban missile crisis and ongoing Cold War MAD fears. The 1910-1940’s were jam packed with world wars, the Great Depression, Spanish flu, and more. And before that a quarter of all children died young. Every generation ever. What’s actually unprecedented is having a few years between crises where things are actually pretty ok!
Shhhhh, you're harshing the millennial vibe. Remember that due to their constant suffering the millennials are the most empathetic generation ever and everyone else are the narcissists.
Probably 9/11. The resulting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were largely fought by Millennials (with some gen-z nearer to the end, I think—but the initial invasions heavily involved "elder millennials" [EDIT: and x/y "cuspers", especially for Afghanistan], with younger millennials involved in the long middle period). Though Vietnam (among other wars, but it seems most-comparable) was easily within living memory at the time, so I'm not so sure about "once in a lifetime" for the wars. That kind of wildly-successful attack on the US, though—that part might more-or-less qualify.