Partly disagree—the relevant question isn’t distance, it’s the amount of wildlife from specific places. New York is further from Atlanta than from Litchfield, CT, but there are more people from Atlanta in New York at any given time. And we know that there’s a lot of trade in wildlife in Wuhan from distant places, which is the critical question.
I’ve always wanted to see some hard data on this. All the wet markets in China and Vietnam, numbers of animals per month, etc. That kind of model would be extremely useful in pinning down just how unlucky an innocent WIV would be.
Looks like such data doesn’t exist, and post-2020 wildlife trading ban, new data won’t tell us anything about pre-ban conditions—but we know there is lots of cross-border and long distance transport of wildlife. See, for example, this. And elsewhere in Asia, we see similar descriptions of very large volume of wildlife trade over long distances.
Partly disagree—the relevant question isn’t distance, it’s the amount of wildlife from specific places. New York is further from Atlanta than from Litchfield, CT, but there are more people from Atlanta in New York at any given time. And we know that there’s a lot of trade in wildlife in Wuhan from distant places, which is the critical question.
I’ve always wanted to see some hard data on this. All the wet markets in China and Vietnam, numbers of animals per month, etc. That kind of model would be extremely useful in pinning down just how unlucky an innocent WIV would be.
Looks like such data doesn’t exist, and post-2020 wildlife trading ban, new data won’t tell us anything about pre-ban conditions—but we know there is lots of cross-border and long distance transport of wildlife. See, for example, this. And elsewhere in Asia, we see similar descriptions of very large volume of wildlife trade over long distances.