Same for American news

Are there any variants that can spread from birds to humans but not from humans to humans? Definitely not an expert in this at all, but it seems like the virus wouldn't care where it was before it got in to someone's mucous membranes. I can certainly imagine some modes of transfer will be less likely because maybe this variant causes chickens to sneeze, but not people, greatly reducing transmissivity, but seems unlikely to me to be impossible.

"Although the virus has caused severe illness in some patients, Chinese authorities say there's no evidence so far that the disease can be passed through human contact."

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/mystery-illnesses-china-caused...

Was this not how Covid-19 was announced ?

At first it wasn’t human to human and then…

Yet

Potatoe potato

You would need to obtain a sufficient viral load in order to be infected. One or two copies won't do the job, you'd need to ingest infected material in some manner. Eye splash, breathe dust from cleaning a chicken house, or vicsera that harbor many copies of the virus. This is why we throw the guts out of most things before we continue preparation.

Imagine a bucket of raw inverted chicken lungs.

Ew.

Mask requirements are not lockdowns.

In what sense is 'one in 100 year' equivalent to '0.2% every year'? With the latter you'd expect 0.2 of them in 100 years?

(Totally agree the phrasing is misleading to the layman though, which is really the only reason for it to exist anyway, in an attempt to be more relatable.)

Not likely. The 60’s had riots, Vietnam, political assassinations, Cuban missile crisis and ongoing Cold War MAD fears. The 1910-1940’s were jam packed with world wars, the Great Depression, Spanish flu, and more. And before that a quarter of all children died young. Every generation ever. What’s actually unprecedented is having a few years between crises where things are actually pretty ok!

That's the beauty (?) of statistics for you!

American news falls over itself rushing to cover disasters.

Nyet

India is almost the same size but doesn’t seem to have this pattern.

Quick guesses:

Maybe Indians have less contact with wildlife (due to different settlement patterns, or religious or cultural restrictions on eating wild animals?), or less average physical mobility (more expensive and inconvenient long-distance transportation), or a climate less conducive to certain modes of virus transmission?

A smaller fraction of the population working or commuting in huge indoor spaces?

Maybe (contrary to Americans' intuition) Chinese public health surveillance is both more effective and more transparent than Indian, leading to a measurement bias because some disease outbreaks that arise in China get better-documented?

The solution to this problem is the same as nearly every other problem humans create: stop destroying ecosystems and animal habitats, stop expansion, reduce meat eating, etc. These things increase the transmission of zoonotic diseases. There was a really good article in 2020 that I can now not find where an expert discussed how these things are not new, COVID was not a surprise, and that these transmissions will do nothing but increase in frequency if we don't systematically tackle these problems.

> The viral jump from animals to humans

I thought the most likely origin of Covid-19 is a lab leak (at least according to the latest from the DOE and the FBI), likely from gain-of-function research gone wrong?

People in China also interact more closely with animals, and with a wider variety, than in the West. The West does not have any wet markets or nor the wide variety of species available for consumption. This helps in the virus jumping species. Once it jumps, the population density helps it spread.

Nah, that’s a false equivalency because you’re equating “some corruption exists” like in the US to ~99% corruption as it exists in China w.r.t how it seems you are defining corruption in the mainstream press.

Because unlike China there exists enough of a free press, from institutions down to individual bloggers and professors, who can jump on the Internet and write almost anything without repercussion and if they write something very good or very important it’ll be spread.

Just because “American also bad” doesn’t mean that they are in the same ballpark of bad.

Everything is information. It might be accurate, it might not. Personally I would not _trust_ the tornado report: maybe it was 25 people or 27? What motivations might there be to exaggerate or diminish the number? Disaster reporting often exaggerates during the initial phase, and then corrects (or not) later. In that case, perhaps errors are more likely to be a lack of knowledge, to reflect hearsay and confusion between agencies?

I think it’s an important to maintain an attitude of skepticism, to be aware of sources of error, and biases that might be at play. Blind _trust_ in information sources is foolhardy.

Probably 9/11. The resulting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were largely fought by Millennials (with some gen-z nearer to the end, I think—but the initial invasions heavily involved "elder millennials" [EDIT: and x/y "cuspers", especially for Afghanistan], with younger millennials involved in the long middle period). Though Vietnam (among other wars, but it seems most-comparable) was easily within living memory at the time, so I'm not so sure about "once in a lifetime" for the wars. That kind of wildly-successful attack on the US, though—that part might more-or-less qualify.

Millennial bingo:

  2008 financial crisis

  2020 pandemic (& Brexit)

  2022 war start + highest winter temperatures ever recorded 

  2023 economic downturn and layoffs

Who knows what the future holds.

maybe 9/11 + Iraq war, not sure... losing count at this point

>Monkeypox was pretty clearly a non-event for the vast majority of the population pretty early on

Just like how it's pretty clear that the coronavirus wasn't "a global emergency"?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/health/china-virus-who-em...

No it wasn't but because your gamble won and with hindsight bias you can state that now.

It remained a non-event for the vast majority of the population because the most vulnerable proportion of the population participated in a widespread vaccination campaign. If a little extra screen time in the media made that campaign successful it paid dividends for public health, imo.

The US exports military vehicles all over the world, and often is fighting against forces using them, in actual wars (as opposed to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which is between Russia and Ukraine). We gave $18 billion in military equipment to the Taliban last year. That Ukraine has US military equipment means very little.

The US is providing security assistance to Ukraine, and condemns Russia's advance, but the US is not fighting a war in Ukraine

Almost every war everywhere is fighting with AK's somewhere in the mix, often on both sides. Arms is a very dirty industry and many governments play it, often with proxy dealers to allow them to be arms (da-dish) length and offer plausible deniability. Very often, a superpower or country ends up being shot at with the weapons it provided years or decades earlier.