172driver wrote:
Markets selling live exotic animals? Where ?
“Wet market” doesn’t mean “live exotic animal market”. A market selling fresh meat and produce is a “wet market”. These wet markets exist all over Europe, including in the UK.
But the Chinese give you the pleasure of selecting which dog you like the look of, and then murdering it for you in front of your own eyes.
LeSving wrote:
Laws regarding pandemics have existed a couple of hundred years already. It’s nothing new. What’s new is it’s happening now.
The restrictions on freedoms currently in place in most western jurisdictions have required fairly extensive legislation to implement.
Very few ‘free’ societies rumble along in normal times with such powers permanently in the back pocket of the government. Having a plan (which of course all governments and health services do) is not the same as having the power to implement it without recourse to democracy. I for one am extremely glad this is the case and sincerely hope, as this pandemic subsides, that our electorate takes a great interest in ensuring all these powers are locked back up in the box they came from.
The idea that the government of the day could, in the normal course of things, hold in its grasp discretionary and arbitrary power to criminalise leaving your own home is abhorrent.
flybymike wrote:
But the Chinese give you the pleasure of selecting which dog you like the look of, and then murdering it for you in front of your own eyes.
Which is one reason I find aspects of their culture so completely abhorrent, and why I will almost certainly never visit the country.
Valentin wrote:
Nobody made the decision to bring Covid into Germany and nobody could prevent this from happening.
Oh yes – from the point of view of the “I’ll manage my own risk” philosophy everybody who travels from A to B made the decision to risk bringing a disease from this A to this B. It is no excuse that these people might have been too narrow minded to realize that they took that risk for me.
Graham wrote:
We cannot continue to control it with lockdowns – people have had enough of that.
Most countries haven’t even tried yet. In Germany we don’t have a lockdown: More than half of the people are still going to work every day. So people have had enough before they actually experienced it.
Graham wrote:
Perhaps the ‘new normal’ for the 21st century is simply that infectious disease is a real concern for humankind again,
I would rather say: It has (or should have) always been. It is just a very “Euro-USA cultural imperialism” view that in the last about 15 years (no longer) we declared victory over communicable disease with little factual reason: Malaria is a poor people’s problem. HIV is a skeevy people’s problem. Cholera is a filthy people’s problem – and who really cares about these weird diseases like yellow fever, dengue, etc.
As a vegetarian I have to wonder what is so special about dogs that elevates them above species Westerners are happy to eat such as pigs?
Probably depends on whether you have a pet pig in the living room.
Thinking about the future for a moment…..
We can of course pressurise the Chinese to be more open and report any issues quicker, which would be a good thing. But there is always a risk that such a leadership will suppress information if they think they will be able to keep it under control.
So that leaves us with what we can do ourselves. As nations, I think there is a lot to learn from our lack of control over this virus. But before we can even attempt to do better next time, we need to know about it next time. So we should be thinking about how we can implement an early warning system so that if the nation it originates from doesn’t disclose the presence of a new virus (or doesn’t know about it) that the rest of the world learns about it as early as possible so that we can put plans into place (whatever they turn out to be).
That leads me to the question: Is it feasible to genetically sequence a swab from everyone who reports to their doctor with a runny nose, cough, feeling unwell or anything else that we suspect is virus or bacteria related?
If so, we could share that data internationally, where it relates to a new disease, and get an early warning on the spread of new viruses and bacteria. Obviously it’s hard to predict if a new virus is going to be an issue or not, but it at least gives us the information early so that we have the option of making decisions.
So is it feasible?
flybymike wrote:
But the Chinese give you the pleasure of selecting which dog you like the look of, and then murdering it for you in front of your own eyes.
We do the same with fish and shellfish all over Europe. Same in south Eastern Europe with chicken and even sheep. For the types of meat more common in Central Europe it is more a question of practicability as you rarely buy a whole cow at once.
Btw: I have to admit that my experience in China is limited to a couple of major cities and I’ve never been in real rural china – but at least what I have seen there is not fundamentally different from what I have seen in Europe. Yes, there are some “exotic” animal there, but they are just exotic to a European observer as the locals are used to them.
I have never seen a market where you can buy dogs for food and I have for sure neither seen nor heard about it being slaughtered in front of your eyes (seen that with sheep in south-eastern Europe, though.). I have also never seen a restaurant where you could order dog. But what I have found out (by talking to people…) is, how dog actually tastes: “Taste like grandma” is by far the most often heard quote there – obviously not like eating grandma but like the comfy food you only get when you visit your grandparents. It’s a bit like the feeling many people in Europe have when eating horsemeat.
Malibuflyer wrote:
from the point of view of the “I’ll manage my own risk” philosophy everybody who travels from A to B made the decision to risk bringing a disease from this A to this B. It is no excuse that these people might have been too narrow minded to realize that they took that risk for me.
Some might see it as narrow minded to believe that you can you can quarantine all others in your own self interest, at their expense, on the off chance that one them might have a hidden illness that you personally don’t want to contract. For many or most people CV-19 rises to the level of a common cold, based on recent experience in my household. The collective responsibility is to protect those who are individually vulnerable, to the extent practical, not to destroy the lives of everybody else in doing so.
I think it was probably reasonable for e.g. the US to shut down travel from China and Europe for a short period to see if it might have some effect on preventing the illness from spreading. But on the other hand that was a extreme long shot, never likely to work and after a while with the illness spread worldwide, it becomes silly political theatre.
Its nice to read here that some are slowly coming around to see reality but I think in Europe it may take years for the damage done by the most extreme experiment in public health policy ever undertaken to be undone. It is a lesson in what happens when you let naive and self important people have too much authority, especially when they themselves (government employees) do not suffer from the resulting business failures.
