My US$0.02, which in local currency is CLP16.93 (buys you fuckall, but if you export a lotta shit I guess you're happy): we were told this would happen. Part of a Zakaria Global Briefing e-mail from February 28:
Quote:
'Disease X' Is Here
As it turns out, we were warned: The coronavirus hews with surprising fidelity to characteristics listed by a group of health experts in 2018, when they warned the WHO that humanity was vulnerable to a pandemic of a hypothetical "Disease X."
"Disease X, we said back then, would likely result from a virus originating in animals and would emerge somewhere on the planet where economic development drives people and wildlife together," Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist on that team, writes in a New York Times op-ed. "Disease X would probably be confused with other diseases early in the outbreak and would spread quickly and silently; exploiting networks of human travel and trade, it would reach multiple countries and thwart containment. Disease X would have a mortality rate higher than a seasonal flu but would spread as easily as the flu. It would shake financial markets even before it achieved pandemic status."
In other words, it would look just like this virus. As for how to protect ourselves in the future, Daszak writes that prevention efforts need to be sustained between headline-grabbing outbreaks, with efforts directed toward "disease surveillance." In more immediate terms, The Economist warns that the virus is coming, and governments should heed lessons from China: that it's best to communicate actively with the public, to try to slow the disease with quarantines, and to undertake the "painstaking" logistics of figuring out, for instance, how to set aside hospital beds and floors.
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So that's the scientific community, which nobody listens to, and The Economist, which Joe Sixpack, Hockey Mom and Donald Trump do not read (Trump does not read anything, as we're well aware of). But there's another source that warned us: EVERY FUCKING ZOMBIE MOVIE. OK, not
every one of them, not the George Romero classics, but the zombie subgenre eventually became a litany of bullcrap flicks in which zombie shenanigans start with some kinda virus. And unlike science and neoliberal newspapers, virtually everybody gets hooked on zombie pap! So how did they not see this coming! Incompetent fuckos! Next: Thanos wipes out half of all life in the universe by snapping his fingers while admiring the Leaning Tower of Pisa!