The fear factor is very high, and with good reason, but it is also ingrained in our culture to bravely persevere. There are a lot of things we can worry over, but I try not to editorialize too much without at least providing references. I was recently criticized on this, and also on another thread, because I “cut and paste” a lot. I do this because experts can express most things far better than I can. Full context for a fuller understanding is usually quite long and tedious reading. If I wanted original content I’d tune in to Netflix!
Also, there is increasing evidence, despite the interference and misdirection, to discover what led to the outbreak. The Chinese government at the expense of the Chinese people made the situation worse within China, and allowed the Covid virus to spread throughout the world. So far, to date the spread of this virus has resulted in 2.7 million deaths worldwide.
The Covid-19 pandemic almost didn’t happen, a new genetic dating study shows
The coronavirus pandemic almost didn’t happen, a new study shows.
Researchers working to show when and how the virus first emerged in China calculate that it probably did not infect the first human being until October 2019 at the very earliest. And their models showed something else: It almost didn’t make it as a pandemic virus.
Only bad luck and the packed conditions of the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan – the place the pandemic appears to have begun – gave the virus the edge it needed to explode around the globe, the researchers reported in the journal Science.
“It was a perfect storm – we know now that it had to catch a lucky break or two to actually firmly become established,” Michael Worobey, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona who worked on the study, told CNN.
“If things had been just a tiny bit different, if that first person who brought that into the Huanan market had decided to not go that day, or even was too ill to go and just stayed at home, that or other early super-spreading events might not have occurred. We may never have even known about it.”
… The study indicates the virus did emerge in China’s Hubei province and not elsewhere, the researchers said.
Pandemics have plagued humankind throughout written history. Pandemics generally can run a course of many years (plagues), to much shorter durations of just a year or two. The 2018 Spanish influenza lasted just two years (without vaccines or modern therapies). SARS lasted just two years as it spread in China, the United States, Canada, Southeast Asia, South America, Europe without an effective vaccine or cure, but did essentially disappear on it’s own. There does not appear to be just one all-inclusive answer on what will defeat the pandemic we face today.
(How Long Historical Pandemics Actually Lasted)
We all know that modern technology and science has created many cures and therapies used in medicine. Science also contains the possibility of creating many of the problems humanity faces. I think we all have seen enough doom and gloom in our lifetimes, and more recently, caused by this one Coronavirus, which almost certainly had originally come out of a research lab in Wuhan China. Many labs around the world have been using CRISPR to alter DNA sequences, including China’s first biosafety level 4 (BSL–4) laboratory. The current coronavirus pandemic appears to have first appeared and spread out of the Jiangxia District, Wuhan, Hubei China.
CRISPR (/ˈkrɪspər/) (which is an acronym for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) is a family of DNA sequences found in the genomes of prokaryotic organisms such as bacteria and archaea. – Wikipedia
Along with miracle cures there has been much portrayed in films and discussed in articles on the threat of using such advances in science to cause harm, rather than better humanity. One such article written in March of 2019 states, “The motivation for a bioterrorist to carry out acts of bioterror stems from a consciousness of ignorance.” The same article mentions the movie “Rampage” where CRISPR research led to using it as a biological weapon. The article goes on to state, “Besides, bio-terror attacks, unlike nuclear and chemical weapons, are not confined to a limited area; they spread worldwide and have worldwide ramifications.”
(Threat of Bio-terror from crispr | Threat of Bio-terror from crispr)
An even earlier article from August 2017 warned:
Some of these applications – such as the engineering of mosquitoes to resist the parasite that causes malaria – effectively involve tinkering with ecosystems. CRISPR has therefore generated a number of ethical and safety concerns. Some also worry that applications being explored by defence organisations that involve “responsible innovation in gene editing” may send worrying signals to other states.
Concerns are also mounting that gene editing could be used in the development of biological weapons. In 2016, Bill Gates remarked that “the next epidemic could originate on the computer screen of a terrorist intent on using genetic engineering to create a synthetic version of the smallpox virus”. More recently, in July 2017, John Sotos, of Intel Health & Life Sciences, stated that gene editing research could “open up the potential for bioweapons of unimaginable destructive potential”.
An annual worldwide threat assessment report of the US intelligence community in February 2016 argued that the broad availability and low cost of the basic ingredients of technologies like CRISPR makes it particularly concerning.
I’m generally very much a realist and optimist and believe that despite all hardships encountered, Americans will overcome this pandemic. While it is important to stay informed, there are so many threatening situations the world faces without having to worry about all of them. I do worry about the political division that seems to enter every facet of our lives. The solution is not found in Democrats or Republicans … it is found in the opening statement of the US Constitution:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
The political finger pointing that seems to arise in far too many viral discussions is unnecessary, does not lead to solutions, or lead to the ideals stated in the preamble of the Constitution. Each of us as individuals can look to personal responsibility for ourselves, and those around us, in the best way we can. We should do so respectfully realizing the fact that our opinions are based on our own life observations and experiences. Opinions are formed and evaluated as new facts emerge.