Never mind the impeachment, the world is about to end, maybe, and Trump had nothing to do with it, maybe. The new coronavirus from Wuhan has spread around the world and has claimed over a hundred lives. The news is getting worse by the hour, so any video about the current crisis will be out of date by the time that we meet in two days. I will gather the latest videos for the meeting.
For now, here are two old videos on how Bill Gates prepared for a possible pandemic we are now facing:
- 2015 TED Talk - The next outbreak? We’re not ready
- 2017 Davos - Inside Bill Gates' new strategy for battling epidemics
Here are the videos shown at the meeting:
- New Strain of SARS Blamed for Pneumonia Outbreak in China
- Could this coronavirus be Disease X?
- Bloomberg: What Is Coronavirus?
- How the new coronavirus compares to Ebola, Zika and SARS
- Guardian: What is the coronavirus?
- Virus Expert On The Wuhan Coronavirus Outbreak
- China virus outbreak
- President Xi warns of 'grave situation' as infection spreads
- Sick Passenger Escorted Off Baltimore Flight
- Coronavirus ability to spread ‘getting stronger’ says China
- Schumer On Coronavirus
- China coronavirus death toll exceeds 80
- Coronavirus in China: The fight against the outbreak
- South Florida health officials on high alert for coronavirus
- How U.S. & Chinese differ on coronavirus
- WHO weighs coronavirus health emergency
- Coronavirus Is Scary! CDC Budget Cuts Make It Scarier
Here are some notes that might be of interest from “How Animals May Cause the Next Big One,” an article by Florence Williams in the April 25, 2013 issue of The New York Review, p. 31.
ReplyDelete• The next pandemic will likely be caused by a coronavirus (like HIV), one that originates in the RNA of another animal (Williams 2013:31).
• “Viruses that are effective killers, like Ebola, tend to burn out quickly because they annihilate their hosts before germs can spread too far. Viruses that are highly transmissible, like the so-called Spanish flu of 1918, tend to kill only a small percentage of those infected. (The Spanish flu infected 30 percent of the world’s population. It killed about 2 percent)” (Williams 2013:31).
• The Spanish flu ultimately killed around 50 million people, and a warmer wetter planet is providing more breeding ground (Williams 2013:32).
• Diseases can reside undetected within intact ecosystems, and be released to infect humans we disrupt those systems (Williams 2013:31).
• The live animal markets of southern China are teeming with coronaviruses. In one market, a horseshoe bat infected a civet, which infected a doctor attending his nephew’s wedding in 2003, who coughed all night in a room across the hall from a 78 year old Canadian grandmother in a Hong Kong hotel, who became infected with SARS and carried it back to Toronto. Eventually eight thousand people were infected, 774 died, and within weeks the infection had spread to the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, and Taiwan (Williams 2013:31).
• Bats are a vast reservoir of harmful viruses and they “are abundant (one in four mammals is a bat) and very social” (Williams 2013:32).