Remember those “wet markets” in China that started this whole godawful mess? The ones where exotic live animals stew in their own filth and blood and allow new viruses like COVID-19 to mutate?
They’re back in business. Because, as the great American statesman Ron White once said, you can’t fix stupid.
From The Sydney Morning Herald:
Wuhan: Hundreds of shoppers pack a wet market on a December weekday morning in the Chinese city of Wuhan, jostling to buy fresh vegetables and live fish, frogs and turtles.
Almost a year since the city reported the world’s first cases of COVID-19 in one of its handful of vast wet markets, and even as several other countries remain firmly in the grip of the subsequent pandemic, life in Wuhan has largely returned to normal.
“I’m not afraid, what is there to be afraid of?” said Nie Guangzhen, a fish and vegetable vendor.
What’s there to be afraid of? Crashing the world economy? Kids essentially being held back from school for a year? Senior citizens and the immunocompromised dropping dead? Is that enough? I could go on.
And in Indonesian wet markets, bats are back on the menu, along with other bushmeat that scientists have warned for years increase the odds of animal-to-human virus transfer. A word of warning from this article in Business Insider:
But according to experts, a market where different species are brought together and butchered in unhygienic surroundings is the ideal environment for a spillover event to occur.
“It is likely what is going on in Wuhan will be occurring in Indonesia,” Raden Wasito, professor of veterinary medicine at Gadjah Mada University said from his laboratory in Jakarta.
“The Wuhan situation where the coronavirus became pandemic, it’s almost similar to what is going on in Indonesia where there are so many wild animal markets. All of those things can create a reservoir for many kinds of diseases.”
Word to the wise – when things get “back to normal” (I plan on skewering any fantasy you may have about things going back to status quo ante in a future post), I wouldn’t host a mask burning party or pour out your hand sanitizer. You know, so you have them for the next go-around.