I started having panic attacks and needing to find creative places to store my accumulated nonperishable supplies shortly after Valentine’s day.
My attempts to warn people were primarily directed towards my university, my family and those I love. My boss had us ready for cessation of in person activity two weeks before others as a result and he may have helped convince a county to close schools earlier than otherwise. Family hasn’t had to go to a grocery store for 5 weeks.
This place was a bit far from my mind due to drifting away, unfortunately.
There will be a lot more of these this century. What other possible outcome could there be to becoming 40% of mammalian biomass on the planet, with such a well-mixed system?
Indeed, I don’t know why ‘once a century’ would be expected to hold with record amounts of density, travel, and absolute numbers of people in unsanitary conditions.
Is one correct inference to take here that such viral mutations are that common but previously emerged and then disappeared without widespread human infection due to the natural isolation and separation that exists for several reasons?
There’s the fact that most viral spillovers into humans don’t actually transmit well, and the fact that if they do but burn out it doesn’t really matter on the large scale. The latter has definitely changed.
HIV is an interesting case study. Genetically, we can tell it leaped into humans from great apes TWICE in the 1920s (HIV-1 and HIV-2) in a way that kept transmitting around the globe. This probably had to do with the urbanization of sub-Saharan Africa—the sudden sucking of huge numbers of rural people with contact with bushmeat into globally connected urban centers. Presumably it had been transmitting into people forever, just always burning out.
A few years back there was an antibody study in a village near a bat cave in China that found that 0.5% of the people that lived a few hundred meters from the cave showed antibodies against SARS-like viruses.
I started having panic attacks and needing to find creative places to store my accumulated nonperishable supplies shortly after Valentine’s day.
My attempts to warn people were primarily directed towards my university, my family and those I love. My boss had us ready for cessation of in person activity two weeks before others as a result and he may have helped convince a county to close schools earlier than otherwise. Family hasn’t had to go to a grocery store for 5 weeks.
This place was a bit far from my mind due to drifting away, unfortunately.
There will be a lot more of these this century. What other possible outcome could there be to becoming 40% of mammalian biomass on the planet, with such a well-mixed system?
Indeed, I don’t know why ‘once a century’ would be expected to hold with record amounts of density, travel, and absolute numbers of people in unsanitary conditions.
Is one correct inference to take here that such viral mutations are that common but previously emerged and then disappeared without widespread human infection due to the natural isolation and separation that exists for several reasons?
There’s the fact that most viral spillovers into humans don’t actually transmit well, and the fact that if they do but burn out it doesn’t really matter on the large scale. The latter has definitely changed.
HIV is an interesting case study. Genetically, we can tell it leaped into humans from great apes TWICE in the 1920s (HIV-1 and HIV-2) in a way that kept transmitting around the globe. This probably had to do with the urbanization of sub-Saharan Africa—the sudden sucking of huge numbers of rural people with contact with bushmeat into globally connected urban centers. Presumably it had been transmitting into people forever, just always burning out.
A few years back there was an antibody study in a village near a bat cave in China that found that 0.5% of the people that lived a few hundred meters from the cave showed antibodies against SARS-like viruses.