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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

Covid turned into a pandemic because it wasn't taken seriously at the start. (Looking at you, China.)

Public-health experts never seemed concerned about hantavirus. They are with this. It's appropriate to take their declarations seriously.

> Ebola generally requires contact to spread

"Human infection occurs through close contact with the blood or secretions of infected wildlife, such as bats or non-human primates, and subsequently spreads from person to person through direct contact with the blood, secretions, organs, or other bodily fluids of infected individuals or contaminated surfaces. Transmission is particularly amplified in health-care settings when infection prevention and control (IPC) measures are inadequate, and during unsafe burial practices involving direct contact with the deceased" [1].

So yes on traditional burial. But much easier to spread than HIV.

[1] https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2...

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First, we still don't know the origins of Covid-19. The most accepted answer is zoonotic origin but there are problems with that, namely that Wuhan is far from the suspected bats and there is no documented case of Covid-19 in any wild population. The other competing theory is the "lab leak" family but again there's no evidence of this eitehr. Research and findings of Covid-19 in Italian sewerage suggest that Covid-19 might've been circulating in Italy in 2019 [1]. So another possibility is that Covid-19 resulted from forming a virulent strain in a person who was infected with multiple strains at once [2].

We may never know the true origins of Covid-19.

So with asymptomatic spread and a novel virus, it's unlikely that whatever China did actually mattered at all. Once cases reached the US in particular, it was game over. People just can't miss work. There were very few places that maintain zero Covid for any significant period of time (eg Australia) through a combination of luck, geography and extreme quarantine. By geography I mean Australia doesn't have any land borders. And even then it only lasted so long.

[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7428442/

[2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9059428/

>Research and findings of Covid-19 in Italian sewerage suggest that Covid-19 might've been circulating in Italy in 2019 [1].

Nah, it is one paper, and they only did PCR which is extremely sensitive.

It is more likely that they contaminated their samples than they found COVID viruses. It is still more likely they had false positives.

Also they didn't sequence it. There is no data on where it would be in the genetic tree of coronaviruses.

From the paper: >Moreover, it was circulating in different geographic regions simultaneously

Very very likely to be sample contamination or another winter coronavirus triggering a positive PCR. It just doesn't make any sense.

China actually took COVID extremely seriously from the start. They were snatching people from the streets and killing them. The China crematoriums were running non-stop.

It was the US Administration and the Republicans that were the dipshits and turned a health situation into politics.

That was months after the virus was already spreading. China oscillated from pretending it didn't exist in the critical outbreak period (2019), to some of the most extreme lockdowns (early 2020).

Maaan, flashback to how fucking thrilling that time was when there were reports of single digit cases slowly hitting closer home, rapidly building up to a "Holy shit! This is going to be a historic crisis!" when dead bodies started pilling up in front of Italian hospitals. No drug could ever tingle my dopamine receptors like the news ramp up of COVID19 did. What a collective experience. In a parallel universe it's been the event to unite humanity, instead of dividing families.

> They were snatching people from the streets and killing them.

Can you give more info on this? Tried googling it but couldn't find much. I remember there were very strict quarantines, but don't remember reading anything about "killing" people snatched from the street.

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