Its saddening to see the way we are responding to this pandemic. I understand that finding the source of the pandemic is important, however it seems like we are highly politicizing a world wide problem and trying to blame each other for cover ups. If the pandemic started in august and given the rate of transmission we are seeing world wide, we should have had a ridiculous spike in the number of deaths by now. Furthermore, there are many international flights coming out of Wu Han, the rest of the world should have detected the virus earlier then.
The fact is none of us were prepared and we were all too complacent about things. Towards the end of February I made a trip from Singapore to Seattle. At the time the virus was peaking in China. I recall that the flight was extremely empty and already most countries in Asia had begun temperature screening at airports and started conducting quarantines. On the other hand as I walked through the immigration and customs in US there was not even the slightest trace of preparation for the virus. Not once was I asked "did you travel to China?" and for a country with such a large expenditure on defense I cannot see how much it would cost to place thermal cameras at the customs exit.
In all honesty I would love to see a study done on how this virus came to be but this study should be conducted on a purely scientific stand point. In fact it'd be best if we took politics out of the picture and ask
- what was the chain of transmission from its original animal source?
- what type of mutations took place?
- how in future can we come up with a robust international/interspecies virus surveillance program such that we can flag animal viruses which are likely to mutate to infect humans?
As of now all I can see is that both US and China are misbehaving and taking shots at one another. Our global supply chains have come to a halt. There are countries like US and India which overproduced food yet out of fear of lack of food these countries have halted export causing problems for other countries dependent on them for food. Yet, farmers in these countries are having to throw away crop because they cant sell there produce domestically. As a human race can we really stoop any lower?
In all honesty I would love to see a study done on how this virus came to be but this study should be conducted on a purely scientific stand point. In fact it'd be best if we took politics out of the picture and ask
- what was the chain of transmission from its original animal source?
- what type of mutations took place?
- how in future can we come up with a robust international/interspecies virus surveillance program such that we can flag animal viruses which are likely to mutate to infect humans?
As of now all I can see is that both US and China are misbehaving and taking shots at one another. Our global supply chains have come to a halt. There are countries like US and India which overproduced food yet out of fear of lack of food these countries have halted export causing problems for other countries dependent on them for food. Yet, farmers in these countries are having to throw away crop because they cant sell there produce domestically. As a human race can we really stoop any lower?