To think it’s pointless accusing the Chinese of lying.

[bluemoon77]

Trump seems to suspect the virus could have come from the lab rather than the meat market. Isn’t that going to be impossible to prove. Surely we have enough going on right now without having to worry about Trump making things worse.

@BilboBercow

My
Understanding is that both the Black Death and the Spanish flu (ironically) also originated from China.

It's not pointless in terms of Trump's political blame game.

Unfortunately, neither China nor the White House have a shred of credibility and we'll just be hearing propaganda.

I do think its plausible that the virus escaped from the lab, similar has happened before and similar will happen again (there was the smallpox incident in the UK previously).

However, I do think people are too quick to make the leap from 'there is a lab that studies coronaviruses in Wuhan' to 'therefore it probably escaped from the lab'.

The reason the lab is in Wuhan is because of its proximity to bat colonies that carry a lot of coronaviruses. Its not surprising a new coronavirus crossed over to humans in that region.

Grass I think that china owning so much of western debt will influence the debate about where the virus came from quite a lot
Genuine question - if everyone decided not to repay this depot, what would happen?

Debt*

Crispy the first known case of Spanish flu was in Kansas. It's origins are up for debate, France and the UK have been mentioned too. The plague is a tricky one. It appeared to originate in central Asia, but that covers a fuckload of places including parts of Russia and the middle East. There's no indication it started in China specifically. Back then it was impossible to target origins.

One of the German experts thinks it could come from the fur trade, racoon dogs and not the wet markets.

SARS was li linked to civet cats

mobile-reuters-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSPEK23793120061123?amp_js_v=a3&amp_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQFKAGwASA%3D#aoh=15884406779916&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reuters.com%2Farticle%2Fus-china-sars-idUSPEK23793120061123

@CuriousaboutSamphire

Could you explain what you mean by "Who holds live bubonic plague?".

I'm quite intrigued, as it's still about in the big bad world, just it can be treated with antibiotics. Do you mean in an antibiotic-resistant one in a lab?

People have been eating ‘food’ from these wet markets for aeons- seemingly without catastrophic results - very odd that people accept them unquestioningly as the source of Covid esp when demonstrably unsafe labs are in such close proximity

Sabre-rattling in the direction of China is not going to help and is likely to make China more secretive about exactly what happened, especially if a face-saving panic caused the government to act in reckless ways. However, in the fullness of time, it might be possible for countries to take their grievances against China to the International Court of Justice - although whether China would cooperate even with that is a moot point.

People have been eating ‘food’ from these wet markets for aeons- seemingly without catastrophic results - very odd that people accept them unquestioningly as the source of Covid esp when demonstrably unsafe labs are in such close proximity
But wet markets are well established as being epicenters of diseases crossing the species threshold to humans, usually the diseases are mild and dont spread far, only on rare occasions are they serious enough to make the news. There was always going to be a more serious one sometime.

Not ruling out the lab as a possibility but a wet market being the cause would be entirely unsurprising.

Study from 2006 about wet markets being unique epicenters of severe respiratory diseases:

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16940861/

Whatever Trump actually believes is beside the point. He's doing this because he has an election to win in November. He probably knows that the best way to do that is to throw shit around, especially at the Chinese.

His opponents will play into his hands by saying he's wrong and being rude, thus ignoring that the Chinese government are a pretty awful bunch.

Trump is dreadful, but he's unfortunately got a lot more cunning than is often thought.

I have find it strange that people worry about more than about trump, who is a business man who happened to win presidency, than a Vile dictatorship with zero human rights!!

But let's not call them out because '' trump '' said it.

Too long we have been up china's arse.. I hope this situation leads to strict sanctions and we rely on ourselves to more.