Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion. Nobody has ever seen anything like this before.Oh, really? What about the Spanish flu from 1918? What about the bubonic plague? No one has ever seen anything like this before? What a moron.
And just last year Trump's own Department of Health and Human services ran a pandemic simulation called "Crimson Contagion" that showed how completely unprepared his administration was for this outbreak.
That was after Trump sacked the people in the National Security Council who track threats exactly like this.
The outbreak is the first real disaster that has hit Trump that was not of his own making, and he has done an absolutely abysmal job. I can't understand why anyone thinks this guy is any more useful than a doorstop.
So what can we learn from this?
The COVID-19 virus appears to have originated in bats and may have been transferred to humans through wild pangolins sold at a market in Wuhan. This article in USA Today shows that many of the epidemics in recent years have been caused by consuming bushmeat, including SARS, HIV and Ebola.
Other diseases have been caused by domesticated animals, included the Spanish flu (Kansas chickens), MERS (camels), Swine flu (hogs), etc.
Finally, repeated E. coli outbreaks from tainted spinach and lettuce are almost always caused by cattle manure spread on fields or E. coli-tainted water used in irrigation.
Conclusions:
In China people eat wild animals because they think they have some kind of mystical properties. This has got to stop.
In Africa people eat wild animals because they are poor. We need to help poor countries feed their own people better.
The USDA needs to clean up factory farms. Instead of just pumping more antibiotics into their animals, they need to give them more living space and keep their enclosures clean. They also need to destroy sick animals, rather than send them off to market anyway.
In the long run we need to encourage development of alternate sources of protein instead of slaughtering animals. And it's not just about disease: growing cattle for beef is ridiculously inefficient, in terms of the resources used and carbon dioxide emitted.
Meat substitutes like Beyond Meat and lab-grown meat are the wave of the future. In the meantime, if most Americans stopped eating Big Macs and Whoppers our collective life expectancy would go up five years through the reduction in obesity...
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