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The Pandemic

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fruitsalad | 09:55 Sat 08th Aug 2020 | News
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do they know where it came from, are they doing anything to stop it happening again, and will anyone or anything have to answer for all the chaos, its caused around the world?
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It came from bats. The first infection was about 1000 miles from Wuhan in China.
Unfortunately viruses are constantly mutating, so there will undoubtedly be another epidemic in the future.
The virus is an act of nature, and you cannot sue God.
But mistakes were made by Governments that has made the situation worse than it needed to be. But politicians are a slippery bunch and they will blame others for their incompetence (and probably get away with it).
Answers on a postcard to...Cave No2, troglodyte Street, Bug-under-rockshire.
“It came from bats” to “mistakes were made by this government” in the space of two paragraphs.
Congratulations :-)

To stop all future pandemics, bats and governments will be abolished ..
Bats, I can put up with..... :-)
To be fair to Gromit, it is clearly possible in theory for Governments to respond badly to natural disasters.
And when dealing with something new then best guesses are all one can hope for. I think they did ok, apart from the old folks homes issue. Oh and the switch to telling free citizens what they're ordered to wear instead of making sane decisions.
You can’t really stop it happening again.
You can be better prepared, which comes down to fundamentals beyond the reactions of individual governments.
I’m sure that trying to exact revenge - effectively - on perceived perpetrators - is destructive and pointless.
Basically there is no-one to blame overall while individual decisions, regarding reaction/dealing with the threat and then the disaster itself once it had hit, were far too often slow, too limited, wrong, etc. Over the decisions one can say that elected officials will be judged either forgiven (re-election) or not (out). The responsibility of each person for themselves and those dependent on them has primarily rested, and always will rest, with themselves. The problem is that a very significant portion of the public cannot be trusted to favourably protect their own interests and in this case their misjudgement spills out into society as an infection. Lots of people are their own worst enemies and that is why the authorities need to provide guidance and, when that is ignored, issue rules and regulation compelling adherence. Those who both have the sense to protect themselves and empathy to see the interests of others will not object to doing what is advisable when it is not just a choice but an obligation.

This will happen again, few things are as certain.
chinese will eat anything that walks flys or crawls...bats included, and probably slugs as well.
Well many folk eat snails. France is famous for doing so. I guess slugs aren't much of a change. (If anyone is interested I've a garden full of them you can collect from and take away.)
Where did it come from? China. Quite how it got into humans we we probably never be 100% certain.

Stopping it happening again. Depends on what you mean by 'it'. Another viral problem and the World is likely to be better prepared, but I suspect its more likely we will have different problems so being prepared for a virus wont help entirely. You can prepare for the basics but you never really know what you have to deal with until you have it in front of you. In IT we have BCP and DR but even that was thown into disarray in many cases by the Covid panic.
"are they doing anything to stop it happening again,"
"And when dealing with something new then best guesses are all one can hope for."
"You can be better prepared, "

'Exercise Cygnus was a simulation exercise carried out by NHS England in October 2016 to estimate the impact of a hypothetical H2N2 influenza pandemic on the United Kingdom. The exercise showed that the pandemic would cause the country's health system to collapse from a lack of resources, with Sally Davies, the Chief Medical Officer at the time, stating that a lack of medical ventilators and the logistics of disposal of dead bodies were serious problems. As of April 2020, the full results of the exercise remained classified.
The Daily Telegraph reported one government source as saying that the results of the simulation were "too terrifying" to be revealed. According to the Telegraph, the exercise led to assumptions that a "herd immunity" approach would be the best response to a similar epidemic.'

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/07/what-was-exercise-cygnus-and-what-did-it-find

"...the then chief medical officer Sally Davies commented on what she had learnt from it in December 2016.
“We’ve just had in the UK a three-day exercise on flu, on a pandemic that killed a lot of people,” she told the World Innovation Summit for Health at the time. “It became clear that we could not cope with the excess bodies,” Davies said. One conclusion was that Britain, as Davies put it, faced the threat of “inadequate ventilation” in a future pandemic. She was referring to the need for ventilation machines, which keep oxygen pumping in patients critically ill with a respiratory disease such as coronavirus."

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/health/2020/03/government-documents-show-no-planning-ventilators-event-pandemic

"Revealed: the secret report that gave ministers warning of care home coronavirus crisis"

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/07/revealed-the-secret-report-that-gave-ministers-warning-of-care-home-coronavirus-crisis
>Revealed: the secret report that gave ministers warning of care home coronavirus crisis

I'm not sure a 'secret' report will contain any secrets. I think it was pretty obvious to most of us that care homes would be badly hit- sitting targets with an average age of over 80, many over 90, generally other underlying health problems and/or dementia, social distancing impossible for those needing close personal care, and care home staff and coming and going.
"I'm not sure a 'secret' report will contain any secrets."

You will never know if it is kept 'classified'. What is "obvious" to you and others ma have nothing to do with the contents of Exercise Cygnus.


"Another viral problem and the World is likely to be better prepared,"

" A pandemic as lethal as coronavirus has, for the past 13 years, been deemed a “level 5” threat. The only other level 5 threat has been large-scale biological or nuclear attack, but this was deemed to have a less than one-in-200 chance of happening in the next five years. The risk of a pandemic in that time was deemed to be between one-in-20 and one-in-two... The government’s flawed planning assumptions were first articulated under Labour governments in 2005 and 2007. Every government since has either found those assumptions to be useful or simply ignored the threat of a pandemic. The problem, as Professor Alexander puts it to me, is that pandemic preparation involves “telling governments what they don’t want to know, to spend money they don’t have, on something they don’t think will happen”.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2020/03/why-weren-t-we-ready

" The government’s roadmap for how to respond to a coronavirus-like pandemic has long been available online, and the three key documents – the 70-page “Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy”, 78-page “Health and Social Care Influenza Pandemic Preparedness and Response” and 88-page “Pandemic Influenza Response Plan” – were published in 2011, 2012 and 2014 respectively. These plans were tested and failed, yet these documents were not rewritten or revised."
just when you think you have chopped off the head of a crazy stupid thread
another one pops out of the ground
Naomi - I always read what you write - what do you think ?
There have always been plagues of one sort or another, but this is in a class of it's own, its virulence and global impact.
There will be more, but the impact is unprecedented.
The world economy will never be the same, and as country after country succumb to its effects, the blame game will intensify with lawlessness and anarchy.
Look at Lebanon now with a collapsed economy and the explosion in Beirut.
Matthew 24 predicts all of this.
Theland
// [Corona] is in a class of it's own //

Corona - 20 million cases, 0.7milion deaths.
1918 Spanish Flu - 500 million cases, 50 Million deaths.
And more recently "Hong Kong" 'Flu (1968): >80m cases, >1m deaths. Hardly got a mention in Parliament.

The big difference this time is the almost paranoid response by governments worldwide. Never before has the global economy been trashed so comprehensively in an attempt to control a pandemic.

Its far from over. I wish I was wrong.
//Its far from over. I wish I was wrong.//

Of course it's far from over. It won't be over until it's good and ready. We just need to accept that it's here for a while and get on with it. Hiding from it (or attempting to) is not the answer.

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