Music Banter - View Single Post - 21st Century Plague: The Rise and Fall (?) of a Global Pandemic

Trollheart · 05-14-2022, 09:55 AM

Chapter I: Dark Genie: Pandora’s Box Opens

I: Once Upon a Time in Wuhan

Timeline: mid-November - Dec 31 2019

Various factors make it all but impossible to know exactly when and why and how the Covid-19 virus first escaped. The fact that it began without question in China, one of the countries most noted for its suppression of the media and the truth, and always ready to make itself look good at any cost, means we will probably never know the real story. The original idea was that the virus had been carried on horseshoe bats and that it jumped from animals to humans, in a process called zoonosis. However, it’s also theorised that there may have been an intermediate species which interacted with the bats and then passed the strain on to humans. Nobody knows for sure and investigations into the origin of Covid are ongoing. Recently, the team from the WHO (not quite sure what Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend have to do with… oh) revised their conclusion that the virus could not have escaped from a laboratory, citing pressure from the Chinese government, and now supporting that theory as possible, even “likely”. Nobody though is suggesting it was a deliberate act, rather a tragic accident possibly due to inadequate safety procedures.

What we do know without question is that the virus quickly contaminated the tiny town of Wuhan, which is a word everyone is familiar with today, but which before this nobody even knew existed. From there it quickly spread till all of China was infected.

Covid, the COronaVIrus Disease, or Coronavirus 2019, is a SARS virus (SARS: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and related to the almost-pandemic which threatened the world in 2002/2003. Its scientific name is SARS-CoV-2, and it has also been described as a Novel Coronavirus, I guess because at the time it was a new strain. Mostly though it’s just referred to around the world now as Covid-19 or more often just Covid, though President Trump, while in power, tried to stoke anti-Chinese feeling in the USA by calling it “the China Plague” and, completely inaccurately and stupidly, the “Hong Kong Flu”, presumably to pull at the memories of those of us who remember the cartoon kung-fu practicing dog, Hong Kong Phooey. Yeah.

So nobody can say with absolute certainty how the virus started. That’s where the conspiracy nuts come in. Well, you’d expect that wouldn’t you? Nuts gonna conspiracy. But usually that’s all they are: nuts who are largely ignored, often ridiculed and seldom believed by anyone but fellow nuts. But Trump changed all that. When QAnon came out into the open, it should have been sent scurrying back into the shadows with its tail between its legs to the sound of jeers and scornful laughter. But when the then-President of the United States starts retweeting these completely baseless, false and made-up so-called theories, unfortunately, people take notice. And so rumours began about Covid being, I don’t know, developed in secret labs by the Chinese with the help of Hunter and Joe Biden and ZOG and a cabal of blood-drinking, paedophile Hollywood A-Listers and George Soros and insert whatever conspiracy figure you like.

And people started believing.

Which is why we are where we are now. But I’ll be going deeper into all that later. Right now I’m just using it to illustrate the fact that what seems to have been a natural occurrence, tragic yes but involving no human agenda, has now been bumped up to be a massive worldwide conspiracy, resulting in over half of America refusing to take the vaccine shot, and actively - and very stupidly and with zero success - fighting against the virus, or I should say fighting with the virus, as their intransigence and “refusal to comply” has exacerbated what was already a terrible situation, and it’s not likely to get any better any soon.

Unaware of this, uncaring since it is in fact not sentient and doesn’t give two shits whether we believe in it or not, Covid ran rampant across China. Beginning, at best guess (due to the Chinese government’s typical denials and refusal to provide records and details) in the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, in Hubei Province, several people have been offered as the actual “patient zero”, but nobody can confirm this. Market sellers or people working in the Wuhan Virology Laboratory, accountants… there’s no real way to figure it out, and in the end it matters little. The horse has bolted and we’re all being trampled by it, while madly trying to hammer back the stable door onto creaking hinges, as other horses - new variants - also make their escape.

It’s also been reported that, while whomever was the actual patient zero (we can at least be all but certain it was a Chinese resident) there are good reasons to believe that Covid had already made its way to such far-flung shores as Brazil, France and Italy by late November (the first actual case only being reported, or caught, in the first days of December in China). By December 8, one week after the first case had been reported, over forty people had been confirmed as positive with the new Coronavirus. By the end of December, as more patients began pouring in to the Wuhan Central Hospital and experts in infectious diseases were called in, the Chinese CDC was advised of the seriousness of the situation.

On December 30, mistakenly believing they were dealing with cases of “infectious pneumonia”, all linked to the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission sent a series of directives, one of which was to have tragic and far-reaching consequences, not only for China but for the rest of the world. It forbade doctors from spreading information about the medical treatment being given, without official authorisation. In effect, China can be accused of hushing up and covering up the whole thing, which I suppose in fairness you might expect from just about any country. Nobody wants to be seen as the springboard for a worldwide pandemic, and again to be fair, nobody wants to spread panic unnecessarily. But again, this is China, where information is tightly controlled and the government takes responsibility for nothing unless it is to their advantage.

By the next day the Chinese public were being advised to watch for symptoms of “flu” and “high fever”, and to seek hospital admission in this case. People were advised to wear face masks in public, not the first time China had had to do this, so it was something they were used to and probably didn’t cause the kind of immediate panic such an instruction would engender over this side of the world.

So far, no deaths had been reported.

Outside of Hubei, Hong Kong was the first to respond, placing thermal sensors at their ports and airports to monitor the body temperature of incoming passengers, and also advising the wearing of face masks. They also provided detailed information on how to wash hands properly. Anyone who had been in Wuhan fourteen days before the outbreak and who presented with symptoms of this “fever” would be put into isolation. The WHO office in China relayed the information on to its counterpart in the South Pacific, which in turn advised the CDC. Taiwan began tightening security measures on flights or ships from Wuhan.

As we all celebrated the arrival of 2020, nobody had the faintest clue what we were heading into. Those few of us who kept up with the news (myself not among them) had some vague idea of a virus outbreak in China somewhere, but that was thousands of miles away, and could never affect us, could it? We were safe.

05-14-2022, 09:55 AM	#2 (permalink)
Trollheart Born to be mild Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: 404 Not Found Posts: 26,970	Chapter I: Dark Genie: Pandora’s Box Opens I: Once Upon a Time in Wuhan Timeline: mid-November - Dec 31 2019 Various factors make it all but impossible to know exactly when and why and how the Covid-19 virus first escaped. The fact that it began without question in China, one of the countries most noted for its suppression of the media and the truth, and always ready to make itself look good at any cost, means we will probably never know the real story. The original idea was that the virus had been carried on horseshoe bats and that it jumped from animals to humans, in a process called zoonosis. However, it’s also theorised that there may have been an intermediate species which interacted with the bats and then passed the strain on to humans. Nobody knows for sure and investigations into the origin of Covid are ongoing. Recently, the team from the WHO (not quite sure what Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend have to do with… oh) revised their conclusion that the virus could not have escaped from a laboratory, citing pressure from the Chinese government, and now supporting that theory as possible, even “likely”. Nobody though is suggesting it was a deliberate act, rather a tragic accident possibly due to inadequate safety procedures. What we do know without question is that the virus quickly contaminated the tiny town of Wuhan, which is a word everyone is familiar with today, but which before this nobody even knew existed. From there it quickly spread till all of China was infected. Covid, the COronaVIrus Disease, or Coronavirus 2019, is a SARS virus (SARS: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and related to the almost-pandemic which threatened the world in 2002/2003. Its scientific name is SARS-CoV-2, and it has also been described as a Novel Coronavirus, I guess because at the time it was a new strain. Mostly though it’s just referred to around the world now as Covid-19 or more often just Covid, though President Trump, while in power, tried to stoke anti-Chinese feeling in the USA by calling it “the China Plague” and, completely inaccurately and stupidly, the “Hong Kong Flu”, presumably to pull at the memories of those of us who remember the cartoon kung-fu practicing dog, Hong Kong Phooey. Yeah. So nobody can say with absolute certainty how the virus started. That’s where the conspiracy nuts come in. Well, you’d expect that wouldn’t you? Nuts gonna conspiracy. But usually that’s all they are: nuts who are largely ignored, often ridiculed and seldom believed by anyone but fellow nuts. But Trump changed all that. When QAnon came out into the open, it should have been sent scurrying back into the shadows with its tail between its legs to the sound of jeers and scornful laughter. But when the then-President of the United States starts retweeting these completely baseless, false and made-up so-called theories, unfortunately, people take notice. And so rumours began about Covid being, I don’t know, developed in secret labs by the Chinese with the help of Hunter and Joe Biden and ZOG and a cabal of blood-drinking, paedophile Hollywood A-Listers and George Soros and insert whatever conspiracy figure you like. And people started believing. Which is why we are where we are now. But I’ll be going deeper into all that later. Right now I’m just using it to illustrate the fact that what seems to have been a natural occurrence, tragic yes but involving no human agenda, has now been bumped up to be a massive worldwide conspiracy, resulting in over half of America refusing to take the vaccine shot, and actively - and very stupidly and with zero success - fighting against the virus, or I should say fighting with the virus, as their intransigence and “refusal to comply” has exacerbated what was already a terrible situation, and it’s not likely to get any better any soon. Unaware of this, uncaring since it is in fact not sentient and doesn’t give two shits whether we believe in it or not, Covid ran rampant across China. Beginning, at best guess (due to the Chinese government’s typical denials and refusal to provide records and details) in the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, in Hubei Province, several people have been offered as the actual “patient zero”, but nobody can confirm this. Market sellers or people working in the Wuhan Virology Laboratory, accountants… there’s no real way to figure it out, and in the end it matters little. The horse has bolted and we’re all being trampled by it, while madly trying to hammer back the stable door onto creaking hinges, as other horses - new variants - also make their escape. It’s also been reported that, while whomever was the actual patient zero (we can at least be all but certain it was a Chinese resident) there are good reasons to believe that Covid had already made its way to such far-flung shores as Brazil, France and Italy by late November (the first actual case only being reported, or caught, in the first days of December in China). By December 8, one week after the first case had been reported, over forty people had been confirmed as positive with the new Coronavirus. By the end of December, as more patients began pouring in to the Wuhan Central Hospital and experts in infectious diseases were called in, the Chinese CDC was advised of the seriousness of the situation. On December 30, mistakenly believing they were dealing with cases of “infectious pneumonia”, all linked to the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission sent a series of directives, one of which was to have tragic and far-reaching consequences, not only for China but for the rest of the world. It forbade doctors from spreading information about the medical treatment being given, without official authorisation. In effect, China can be accused of hushing up and covering up the whole thing, which I suppose in fairness you might expect from just about any country. Nobody wants to be seen as the springboard for a worldwide pandemic, and again to be fair, nobody wants to spread panic unnecessarily. But again, this is China, where information is tightly controlled and the government takes responsibility for nothing unless it is to their advantage. By the next day the Chinese public were being advised to watch for symptoms of “flu” and “high fever”, and to seek hospital admission in this case. People were advised to wear face masks in public, not the first time China had had to do this, so it was something they were used to and probably didn’t cause the kind of immediate panic such an instruction would engender over this side of the world. So far, no deaths had been reported. Outside of Hubei, Hong Kong was the first to respond, placing thermal sensors at their ports and airports to monitor the body temperature of incoming passengers, and also advising the wearing of face masks. They also provided detailed information on how to wash hands properly. Anyone who had been in Wuhan fourteen days before the outbreak and who presented with symptoms of this “fever” would be put into isolation. The WHO office in China relayed the information on to its counterpart in the South Pacific, which in turn advised the CDC. Taiwan began tightening security measures on flights or ships from Wuhan. As we all celebrated the arrival of 2020, nobody had the faintest clue what we were heading into. Those few of us who kept up with the news (myself not among them) had some vague idea of a virus outbreak in China somewhere, but that was thousands of miles away, and could never affect us, could it? We were safe. __________________ Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018 Last edited by Trollheart; 05-21-2022 at 09:55 AM.