COVID 19 - How and when it began

COVID 19 - How and when it began

In Wuhan, China, there is a "wet market," a street fresh meat market where people can get all kinds of exotic meats.  The meat of dogs, birds, bats, and other wild animals is for sale.  Scientists have recognized that a corona virus commonly found in the droppings of bats that live in the region around Wuhan were on bat meat being sold at the market.  Recent reports indicate that people living in the area have other interactions with the bats and the bats’ dung, meaning that there may have been other ways the virus jumped into the human pool.

Corona viruses are very common in the world.  You will see them noted among the things that bleach or Lysol kills when they are used for cleaning.  Just like there are many different kinds of germs, there are many different kinds of viruses.  And there are many different kinds of corona viruses so the World Health Organization has teams of people who live in several places around the world who watch for people who get sick because of some new virus that makes the jump from animals to humans and causes diseases.  

Even though in 2018 President Trump closed the office of the American researchers in China, doctors from other nations stayed and discovered this bat-related virus (COVID 19) had infected quite a number of people by late October of 2019.  A Chinese research lab isolated and identified the virus and China took steps to try to prevent the spread.  They were unsuccessful but they did not share their information very widely, most likely because under their Communist form of government, really bad news is hidden because it would make the government look bad.

Rumors and conspiracy theorists have floated the idea that the Chinese army genetically altered the virus and then accidentally or intentionally spread it.  Others say it was produced by American bioweapon manufacturers and experimented with in China, maybe as part of the economic conflict between China and America.  These and other such stories are false.  Other scientists who were aware of the virus examined it and reported that it was natural in its formation and not altered genetically.

Whether the virus jumped from the bat meat to humans by it being eaten or by contact with the hands of the workers at the market and transferred to the facial openings of the eyes, nose, or mouth, it is not clear.

Throughout history, animals that are used regularly by human beings, especially since they have been domesticated, have passed germs (single cell live creatures) and viruses (even tinier things that only come to life when they enter a host body like a human being) to humans and caused serious epidemics that harmed people.  Things like chicken pox, cow pox, swine flu, smallpox, influenza, and many other diseases have occurred that way.  (See Jared Diamond's book GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL, chapter 11, for more information.)  

I think it was the AIDS epidemic which led public health agencies in many countries in the United Nations to begin putting doctors in certain places like China and Africa to watch for such events.  Because of those monitoring groups, other very serious diseases like Ebola were spotted early and not allowed to spread very widely from their points of origin.  

The coronavirus discovered in 2019 (hence called COVID 19) got away and spread into the human population.  

On April 23, 2020, doctors found that a person died of COVID 19 in Santa Clara County, USA, back in February, meaning that she had been infected in January, two months before the earliest reported COVID 19 cases had been discovered in Washington state.  Up till early March, COVID 19 was thought to be transferred by being close to someone who had traveled in China recently.  But after them, cases began to come up in California that the patients had not traveled nor been in direct contact with anyone who had traveled to China.  The pandemic hit New York state, brought by people flying in from Europe.  It was discovered that many spread the virus even though they were not sick themselves.

It appears that what happened was that the virus had spread so quickly that because of air travel and cruise ships and world conferences and sporting events and crowded subways, the virus spread like the flu and common colds do, so quickly that it had probably arrived in every country in the world by January first.  

The more developed countries like the United States probably had hundreds of thousands of cases by February 1 and then, despite the American government's slow response (probably because of the same reasons China was unwilling to acknowledge how bad it was), cities, counties, and states in the US, along with some of the European countries like Germany, took action to try to stop the spread.