Coronavirus

Well, bugger. There have been 20 cases diagnosed in my town in the past week (population of around 140k), 5 of those today and 6 yesterday. That's as well as the 11 diagnosed in the town that adjoins this one and not counting the ones in the next nearest towns, bearing in mind a lot of people travel into my town for work (and visiting shops and pubs). So disappointing when we got it down to 3-4 a week, and this is before schools go back.
 
Dr. Eddies Wingman said:
My optimism for events in 2021 is starting to fade. It seems that despite a rather moderate degree of opening up society across Europe, the numbers are going up.

Makes me worried we'll have to live with many limitations for a long time to come yet.
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Too many apathetic people around for the numbers to drop drastically. The number of people I've heard say stuff along the lines of "Well, we'll all die one day" or "Well, nobody really wears a mask here" is really maddening. No sense of consequence, no sense of responsibility whatsoever.
 
Bam! 14 more cases here today, highest daily number for months.

So that makes 33 in 7 days, and this area will turn dark blue on the coronavirus map, possibly turn to Lockdown Blue if there are any more cases in the next few days. One of the centres of a cluster of cases is an area of town where a lot of taxi drivers live.
 
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We've had 3 counties go back into lockdown due to outbreaks associated with meat processing plants. The problem seems to be it's low paid work, mainly migrant workers all living together and going to work sick as there's no sick pay.
 
I think you've inadvertently identified the problem.

It's not so much eating meat that's the issue, but we have to eat, therefore it's one of the few industries that's been kept going through out. It's work that spreads it, or more precisely spending 8 hours a day in the vicinity of loads of other cunts:lol:
 
Of course eating meat isn't directly the problem, but these pandemics happen because of close proximity between humans and infected animals. This is how we get swine flu and bird flu pandemics.

The meat processing plants have the perfect conditions for the virus to spread though: cold, dry air with "loads of other cunts" nearby for eight hours a day.
 
Of course it might still turn out that someone's pet cat dragged in an infected bat, and that was the start of it.
 
It's possible, and it is a major line of serious enquiry, but it's also being played up massively in with the 'the Chinese are dirty and eat disgusting stuff' hype. It's also possible that the market just provided the ideal conditions for spread, but had long since made the jump to humans. There's speculation that the virus was well adapted to humans at the time the Wuhan cases came to light, plus the first case identified in Wuhan pre-dated the market outbreak and didn't have any connections to the market. If anything, that likely happened afterwards.

Very close contact between humans and wildlife or domestic animals does carry a risk of disease, that's not limited purely to the meat trade. Another coronavirus identified by the Wuhan lab a few years ago is thought to have infected several workers who went into a mineshaft that was a bat roost. One of the major Ebola outbreaks was supposedly linked to a boy playing inside a hollowed out tree that was a bat roost. I totally agree that human impact on wildlife populations, especially expansion into wildlife habitat - including places full of mosquitoes, has a lot to answer for, but I don't think the meat trade is the be all and end all of zoonoses. Increasing encroachment on habitats, possibly climate change, but also dense human populations and global travel present ideal conditions for pandemics. People probably randomly catch animal diseases all the time and always have.
 
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