[MaupitiBlue]

Somehow, China must be held accountable for this. If it is permitted to externalize the foreseeable consequences of its hygiene and food safety norms, the rest of the world is just asking for covid20, covid21, ad nauseum.

Let’s not pretend that this isn’t just the latest in a long line of epidemics originating in China such as SARS, H1N1, H5N1, H7N9 and H3N2.

[boulos]

I get that you're frustrated. But there are lots of parts of the world that eat bushmeat for various reasons. They persist due to economic challenges that last generations. If you grew up eating a chimpanzee or bat or whatever, because at that time you had to, you might still do it decades later even if you're now wealthier and don't need to.

This isn't specific to China. The most probably cause of SIV => HIV transmission is also bushmeat [1]. The challenge is that many regions of the world have become mobile and interconnected faster than they've removed high-risk "survival activities" (the portion of China near Wuhan is apparently filled with bats, making them an historically important food source). China has banned all wild animal markets, like they did after SARS [2], but it's important to remember that many folks grew up with an incredibly different setting than today in the China/India/Equitorial Guinea of their 1960s childhood.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simian_immunodeficiency_viru...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-bans...

[blobster]

Despite what most people assume, it's mostly rich people eating wild animals, so OP has a point. https://www.npr.org/2020/01/22/798644707/why-wet-markets-per...

[officialjunk]

The real thing to note here is China is a country that has a track record of squashing outbreaks before they get out. Even with all that experience, this sars-cov-2 got out in a major way. This one is different. And many countries didn't take advantage of a 3 month warning. Now it is even more of an issue because the world didn't prepare and is not acting properly yet.

[lwansbrough]

China is held accountable for it... they get the diseases like everybody else.

[MaupitiBlue]

Then they are only paying a small fraction of the mess they’ve created. What about the lives lost in Korea, and Italy, and Iran? Why should those countries suffer because China won’t practice basic hygiene and eats unsafe food?

[roywiggins]

Eh, nobody held America accountable as the probable source of Spanish flu, maybe we could just call it even

[sbmthakur]

I don't know what the parent said, but Spanish flu originated in China, right?

https://www.history.com/news/why-was-the-1918-influenza-pand...

[officialjunk]

that pandemic was h1n1 too

[BubRoss]

It isn't the million muslims imprisoned in modern concentration camps that they should be held accountable for? That is actually something the government is actively doing, not just something that originated inside of china.