...There are many traditional naming conventions that don’t really make that much sense. Somewhat weirdly, for example, we often name diseases after the people who “discover” them—Hodgkin’s disease after Thomas Hodgkin, Parkinson’s disease after James Parkinson, and so on.
But naming viral diseases after places—Guinea worm, West Nile virus, Ebola, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, etc.—is probably just intuitive. Viruses “come” from someplace, after all, and thus people gravitate to those names. I doubt we came up with “Lyme disease” because of some deep enmity toward Connecticut.
As Jim Geraghty notes, the communist Chinese have been far more effective in stopping the spread of information about the coronavirus than in stopping the spread of the coronavirus itself. Today, for example, China expelled most American journalists from the country.
Early on, the communists destroyed samples and suppressed vital information that could have helped mitigate the damage of this new strain of the coronavirus.
The government also silenced doctors who warned about the disease. Some were censured for “spreading rumors” or sharing test results with colleagues, and some were forced to write self-critical public letters—a Marxist mainstay—admitting that the warning “had a negative impact.”
The Chinese communists probably let 5 million people leave Wuhan without screening, according to The Wall Street Journal.
...If reports are correct, it was in Wuhan’s popular “wet markets” that vendors were selling the bats—and possibly snakes—that may have caused the COVID-19 outbreak. “Wet” because the meat sold in its unsanitary stalls was only recently slaughtered.
This kind of thing happens quite often. And not always in China, of course. But the avian influenza was likely transmitted to humans from chickens in a “wet” market.
Scientists have been warning for years that the eating of exotic animals in southern China “is a time bomb.” Acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) also originated in China, and probably jumped to humans through bats. Other coronavirus strains are also likely connected to bats.
I hate to thrust my Western cultural values on anyone, but maybe it’s time to stop eating bats.
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