covid was seeded in europe by chinese WORKERS. 'people travelling, not car exports'. how about, erm, textile workers?
Tens of thousands of Chinese migrants work in the Italian textile industry, producing fashion items, leather bags and shoes with the brand “Made in Italy”. They worked in conditions where they were cramped closely together, which would facilitate the spread [8-10]. Reuters and the reporter D. T. Max wrote about this phenomenon back in 2014 and 2018, respectively [9,10].
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7125421/i don't know how you define that as 'people travelling'. (italy was in fact one of the first european countries to close its border to china, derp). people have to go around the world to make the world system work, stupid. people are involved in global supply-chains, either via their labour directly or their services. people have to interact across borders for the world to function in its current state.
my point being, that the economic and human cost of the last 2 years of lockdowns has been astronomical. it hasn't wiped out flu and it hasn't wiped out covid. one in four flu strains has lost prevalence. wow what a result. we should keep this up for another 8 years, that'll lick it! a totally proportionate and commonsensical fix to a disease for which we have highly effective vaccines!
Amazing how medieval measures really can eradicate diseases.
might i mention, in the same time period, the any number of other flu-like viruses which have arisen, quite naturally? if one flu strain 'disappears', it's likely that in the next few years, another more infectious/more aggressive strain or a similar virus will fill its ecological niche. the yamagata strain, which you refer to, as per the Nature article, is described as 'having slowed down evolutionarily in recent years, with very slow mutations'. so ... what about the majority of flu-type illnesses that mutate fast? LOL.
The stark reduction in global prevalence of B/Yamagata viruses compared with the other lineages may indicate an inherent vulnerability of this lineage. Indeed, B/Yamagata viruses have a lower effective reproductive number than B/Victoria viruses, and B/Yamagata epidemics have a slower initial growth phase with shorter transmission chains than B/Victoria epidemics5. This may make B/Yamagata more vulnerable to breakdowns in onward transmission, especially in the context of social distancing and movement restrictions. Furthermore, although multiple B/Yamagata clades can co-circulate for extended periods, previously long-lived clades went extinct6,7. Although the precise factors that drive B/Yamagata clades into extinction are unknown, the frequency of such extinctions suggests an intrinsic volatility in global B/Yamagata circulation. Lastly, as B/Victoria prevalence has been increasing since 2019, B/Yamagata may have already been at a low prevalence cycle at the beginning of the pandemic.
so, in conclusion: it was the weakest clade in the current mix even before the pandemic, was on the way out as part of a long-term naturally recurring cycle, and there was even evidence that other strains were increasing to make up for it. amazing. you should read the actual journal articles you cite here. i recommend it – i do it for a job.
see, this is the difference between you and i: you scrape sensational headlines from the BBC/ABC, and god knows what level of opportunist tabloid tripe, and i read scientific papers with actual results and conclusions. journalists need their pithy headlines and 250-word ledes, and you seemingly need your dummy ammo for your dumbie arguments.
we devised and exported this global capitalist system. we imbricated our national economies with other nations and other continents. we induced the foreign migrant labour to come to our countries and work, for low wages, in our factories and on our farms. those are the vectors of disease. ports, factories, indigent labourer accommodation, high-density housing and low-income, immigrant rich neighbourhoods.
http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20210827000754South Korea is grappling with a growing number of coronavirus cases among migrant workers, many of whom are living and working in conditions highly vulnerable to cluster infections.
you making out that the disease is spread by 'leisure', 'selfishness', 'people gawping at things' and the relative luxury of 'the tourism industry' is fucking nonsense. to seriously stop international transmission of a highly infectious respiratory ilness, involves putting significant brakes on the entire global economic system. AS I KEEP SAYING.
Last edited by uziq (2021-10-26 22:00:02)
