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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this will be the final nail in the coffin for wet markets and in particular game markets, given this history.

I mean not just in official proclamation but resulting in the complete disappearance even in rural backwaters.

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We can only hope so. Unfortunately animal agriculture as it currently exists is just as dangerous (e.g. chicken CAFOs breeding bird flu). IMO we need to rethink meat production altogether. Meat production needs to be environmentally conscious, health/epidemiologically conscious and at least minimally animal welfare conscious and the price of meat should reflect that all of that extra work is being done.

You are absolutely right. Viruses proliferate in large groups of animals in the conditions we keep them in. So much so that we routinely euthanize millions of animals to prevent viral outbreaks. Avian flu and swine flu both can mutate into global plagues. And we continue - business as usual.

If I remember figures properly, wet market and other exotic animal husbandry industry in China employs close to 10 million. Extrapolate for rest of the world (bushmeat etc). It's not going to get banned, even the one in China I surmise is going to be temporary like SARS, albeit depends on domestic backlash. If anything there will be some actual enforced regulation / intervention to reduced risks. I.e. maybe everyone who works or interacts with the industry will be tracked using technology developed for COVID quarantine.

Also it's important to highlight, there is NO evidence the wet market was the source of COVID, they found older cases back in mid November with no relation to it. The wet market was simply the first hotspot - and seeing how contagious the virus is even in clean environments, the level of squalor wouldn't have made much of a difference. The authorities closed it down because that's where tracing led them, which led to conjecture that inertia-ed into likely cause. Now you still have idiots who thinks it's bat soup. I haven't seen a correction at all since there's more pressing local COVID news. It's like the last ebola outbreak, people were blaming Africans for eating bush meat but patient-0 was traced to a kid playing under a tree where some bats slept in.

True we don’t know the origin of this one, but the article mentions other viruses over the years and decades that mutated from jumping from animal to human to human to human having their start in places in China where close interaction with these animals occurs (either animal husbandry or as bushmeat).

I think the situation will eventually converge to a point where certain animals will be banned, but not the market themselves. The markets will probably be moved into buildings with better sanitation and surveillance with modernized regulations. IMO High density Chinese pork farming, which caused the disastrous pork crisis due to African swine flu last year is a more likely vector for future outbreaks. China has to move to high-density animal husbandry for food autonomy, especially pork. It's one of their key strategic interests that's not going to change, or is even more important to pursue depending on the geopolitical fallout of this pandemic. If anything now is the time to focus and embrace artificial meat. But at the end of the day, it doesn't resolve the fundamental unpreparedness of the world if the cause of COVID was some chance happenstance like some farmer smelled some bat poop.

> I wonder if this will be the final nail in the coffin for wet markets

You can't stop it anytime soon. There will always be underground community wet markets. A high level engineer, that used to work for Disney, happens to be a close family friend (my brother's Godparent^).

He was contracted out to work on the Ghost cities' transportation lines. As it's been documented, they were the planned destination for the forcible relocation of rural residents. At least, as much of the rural population as China thought they could move. In the test cases, the farmers just ended up reverting to american homeless-style survival, as they didn't stay in their sterile buildings for very long and ended up scavenging/defecating on the streets and trying to escape back to the jungle, as you might expect.

After almost 2 years of working by commuting to-from China, one day he saw an accident where some workers got killed and he got the VERY strong sense that he might not be allowed to leave, due to his danger of leaking the story. He calmly finished out that month, came back home to the US and promptly told Disney he wasn't going back. Since it was insisted that the work continue, he stepped down.

^ This informs me, while it should just be a rumor to anyone else.

What does Disney have to do with this

That is quite possible. I wouldn't be surprised if - once all this is over - wet markets are seen as having a similarly skewed risk profile as, e.g., 1st-to-3rd generation nuclear reactors. No problems most of the time; downside risk dominated by rare yet devastating black swans.

The UN should pass a resolution. 100% global sanctions on any country that allows these.

I don’t think you can force something like that on poor countries without a plan for compensation and restructuring some of their food production and distribution.

You might have heard of some Asian country which holds a permanent seat and veto on the Security Council, the only UN body which can effectively enforce anything...

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