Who [in America] Is Dying from COVID Now - Scientific American

[The Barbarian]

Contact tracing/quarantine is effective, but just imagine the panic and paranoia if tracking were to be implemented here.

Yep.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

The world is changing. More mobility, warmer climate, and more people. So expect more of these. It's just the way things are, now.

It was predictable. In 1995:

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance Paperback – Unabridged, October 1, 1995 ​

I have no doubt that we'll see more popping up... but as of right now, some of the lab practices and food cultures are disproportionately responsible for various outbreaks.

Covid is the one we all obviously heard a lot about, but that particular province in China has been responsible for numerous outbreaks that were contained to a more local or regional level.

To give a little context... SARS had 4 separate "escapes" from Chinese virology labs, and 3 separate wet-market sourced outbreaks (2 that were regionally contained, and the bigger 1 that we all heard about in 2003)

And that's not counting the half dozen flu strains that have either had Chinese lab "escapes" or were sourced to wet markets in China from 2002-2012.

Before it became "taboo" to talk about it during covid, the NIH and WHO were sounding the alarm pretty regularly between 2012-2016 about some of the concerning practices in both realms.

So while you're correct in that climate change is going to cause some disruptions from a ecological standpoint (certain animals migrating and coming in contact with other animals they never would have, populations of people without immunity to certain viruses moving into areas and breaking the chain of heard immunity, etc...), certain lab and food practices are expediting it and causing viral emergence that otherwise wouldn't have happened.


With regards to the wet markets in particular, people will often cite "cultural differences"...but there are certain hard-fast rules with regards to certain hygienic practices and cultural sensitivity has it's reasonable limits.

 

[The Barbarian]

So while you're correct in that climate change is going to cause some disruptions from a ecological standpoint (certain animals migrating and coming in contact with other animals they never would have, populations of people without immunity to certain viruses moving into areas and breaking the chain of heard immunity, etc...), certain lab and food practices are expediting it and causing viral emergence that otherwise wouldn't have happened.

Mutated viruses are by no means my worst nightmares about biolabs now. It's not governments; it's rogue groups like criminals and terrorists. There are worse things than infections possible out there.

 

[hedrick]

As I recall, we actually did contact tracing in the early days. There was no way to require people to respond, but we did it. At least in New Jersey. However for it to work, high compliance and quick turnaround is needed, and it has to be started immediately. Effective contact tracing for COVID-19: A systematic review. None of this was true in the US. It is also best if thete are border controls.

If you recall, tests weren’t available in the US at the beginning, and when they became available there were long delays. While there were political problems as well, problems with testing and ambiguity about the effectiveness of masking both made early control virtually impossible.