Covid-19 2020-03-17 Daily Maverick, Covid-19: Planet Earth fights back

I found this article about what is happening to Planet Earth due to the Covid-19 Virus. I hope it will be useful to you.

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2020-03-17-covid-19-planet-earth-fights-back/

Opinionista • Swati Thiyagarajan • 17 March 2020

Covid-19: Planet Earth fights back

Swati Thiyagarajan

Swati Thiyagarajan is an environment journalist, works at Sea Change Project and is consulting environment editor at New Delhi TV, NDTV.

The flip side to Covid-19 is first the understanding that we are not invincible and are just another species on this planet. That the world is round and a crisis in one place can become a crisis in every place. That we are only as strong as our most vulnerable people, and systems put in place to ruthlessly maximise profit while minimising humanity will always lead to disaster.

Patient zero has been around for a while. She is breathless, severely dehydrated, her lungs are compromised, her immunity is compromised, she has a raging high fever with occasional chills. She is 4.5 billion years old and she lived in relative health for 99% of that time. Then this really ghastly virus called the agricultural, and then the industrialised human came along, and she’s been sick pretty ever since.

She, unlike us, self-heals. Over her very long life, she has created life, destroyed it and changed it in order to do only one thing – survive. Her self-healing now, has shut us down. All our arrogance of technological advancement, hyper-capitalism, space travel – and we may as well be hunter-gatherers living in a cave facing down a pride of hungry lions with no weapons, in the face of Covid-19.

A zoonotic disease, it’s not the first and certainly will not be the last. From rabies, to anthrax, to HIV/AIDS, the bubonic plague, the various coronaviruses like Sars, Mers and so on, all zoonotic and all due to our relentless exploitation of the planet and her resources.

While it is not yet clear exactly from which animal this Covid-19 virus originated, it is absolutely fact that it is from a wild animal, poached and trapped against its will, kept and consumed in unhygienic conditions. The original virus could have started in a bat and perhaps came to us through the pangolin, the most trafficked animal on earth. The illegal wildlife trade is worth multiple billions of dollars and scant attention and resources have been allocated to fight it. Poaching has pushed tens of thousands of species to the brink while sanctioned legal development is pushing habitats to the brink. This dangerous combination of both habitat and species loss is exacerbating climate change which in turn is causing damage to our ability to survive as a species.

Biodiversity, or the variety of species in a living ecosystem, is the immune system of the planet. Take the human body. Our bodies have more bacteria than human cells. These microorganisms help keep us alive and healthy. For the human body, the gut or the stomach plus intestines are the most crucial part of our immune system. The greater the biodiversity – or different types of good bacteria in our guts – the better our health and immune response. If an external agent attacks, it’s the immune system that fights it off. Similarly, for planet Earth, it’s her biodiversity that is the immune system. When we, with our exploitative activities, cause issues like climate change, she can cope if her biodiversity stays intact. But we are riddling her precious immune system with holes which adds to the growing ravages of climate change.

This collapse is also forcing people and the wild into closer proximity and forcing poor communities who are hit hardest to turn to poaching and bushmeat and wet markets to supplement their food requirements. It’s easy to point fingers at poor African communities over AIDS and Ebola, and at the Chinese over wet markets and illegal wildlife trade, but unless we acknowledge we are all culpable in this mess, we are in big trouble.

This virus has already forced social isolation on us. We are unable to hug our parents, kiss our grandparents, hold our children. Basic everyday needs that keep us human, that keep us together as a community. There are people dying without being held by their loved ones at the very end. If there are real scars leftover from Covid-19, it would be this. That someone we loved died without a last loving human touch from the person who mattered the most to them.

Biodiversity also is a system of checks and balances. If there are certain species that are prey, there are certain that are predators. If there are species that are parasites, there are also species that feed on them. As biodiversity dwindles, these checks and balances go haywire. Let’s say there’s a herd of deer in the wild. Several predators keep the deer from multiplying too fast and devouring the habitat. The deer also stay alert, fast, fit because of all the running and alertness required to evade the predators. The predators also target the weak, the slow, the sick, keeping the deer population healthy. Without them, the deer will grow in number, out-eat their survivability and get sick.

Sounds familiar? What we do when we get hold of animals is crowd them up, keep them in unhygienic conditions, feed them the wrong foods and sometimes artificially keep them healthy with antibiotics. This has led to a cascade of diseases in humans, adds to making us antibiotic-resistant and then throws up a deadly zoonotic which brings us to our knees.

As omnivores, we pretty much eat anything. While zoonotic diseases come from eating meat raised or housed in unhygienic conditions, it’s not meat per se that’s the problem. It’s factory-farmed meat and illegal wild meat. Both plant-based agriculture and meat farms in the industrialised age cause extensive habitat damage leading to biodiversity loss.

The flip side to Covid-19 is firstly the understanding that we are not invincible and are just another species on this planet. That the world is round and a crisis in one place can become a crisis in every place. That we are only as strong as our most vulnerable people, and systems put in place to ruthlessly maximise profit while minimising humanity will always lead to disaster. Meanwhile, between social distancing, lack of travel and drop in manufacturing and consumption, emissions have dropped, China has seen a blue sky after years, serious concerns are being raised around the wildlife trade and patient zero is feeling better.

If we choose to live on this planet like a breeding prey species that devours like a predator while functioning like a parasite, we will force our host to react more virulently. Hers is an ancient biological intelligence that has powered life for four billion years, It’s honed, it’s extensive and it is a cold intelligence that will do what it takes to survive. As we race to find a vaccine to help us survive viruses, so is she, patient zero, looking for solutions.

If we choose to find the best parts of ourselves, where in lockdown an Italian neighbourhood sang to one another, where young people are going door to door asking older people if they need help in running errands, where the Chinese flew out a whole plane full of experts and helpers and ventilators to Italy, where we learn to live with greater compassion for each other and the living planet, we can hope to cope with and perhaps even thrive in the coming decades.

As the Chinese wrote on their help package, “we are all waves in the same ocean”. DM

Covid-19 2020-02-20 The New York Times, Why Did the Coronavirus Outbreak Start in China?

I found this article very interesting about the "CoronaVirus - Covid-19" and China and its customs. I hope it will be useful to you.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-china-cause.html

Opinion

Why Did the Coronavirus Outbreak Start in China?

Let’s talk about the cultural causes of this epidemic.

By Yi-Zheng Lian

Mr. Lian is a former chief editor of the Hong Kong Economic Journal and a contributing Opinion writer.

• Feb. 20, 2020

A civet, the wild quadruped believed to have passed on the SARS virus to humans, in Wuhan, China, in 2003.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The new coronavirus disease has a name now: COVID-19. That took a while. The virus’s genome was sequenced within two weeks or so of its appearance, but for many weeks more, we didn’t know what to call it or the disease it causes.

For a time, in some quarters, the disease went by “Wuhan pneumonia,” after the city in central China where the first human infections were detected. But guidelines from the World Health Organization, which christened COVID-19 recently, discourage naming diseases after locations or people, among other things, to avoid “unintended negative impacts by stigmatizing certain communities.”

Indeed. On Jan. 29, an Australian tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch featured on its front page a red face mask stamped with “Chinese Virus Pandamonium”: The emphasis on “panda” was the paper’s doing, so the misspelling it highlighted presumably was deliberate, too. A Chinese student in Melbourne protested in an op-ed in another paper, “This virus is not ‘Chinese.’”

Of course, the virus isn’t Chinese, even if its origin eventually is traced back to a cave in China; nor is the disease that it causes.

Epidemics, on the other hand, are often societal or political — much like famines are usually man-made, even though droughts occur naturally.

As far as the current outbreak goes, two cultural factors help explain how the natural occurrence of a single virus infecting a single mammal could have cascaded into a global health crisis. And now for the controversial aspect of this argument: Both of those factors are quintessentially, though not uniquely, Chinese.

The first is China’s long, long history of punishing the messenger.

A doctor who had flagged on social media the risk of a possible viral outbreak was among several people summoned by the police in Wuhan in early January and warned not to spread rumors. He died recently after being infected with COVID-19.

Similarly, the epidemic of SARS — which is caused by another coronavirus — that broke out in southern China in late 2002 was covered up by local authorities for more than a month, and the surgeon who first sounded the alarm was held in military detention for 45 days.

In 2008, a scandal erupted over tainted baby formula, after major Chinese producers were found to have added melamine to milk powder. (Six infants died; 54,000 had to be hospitalized). Four years later the whistle-blower credited with first exposing the problem was stabbed to death under mysterious circumstances.

These are recent examples, but that doesn’t mean they should be pinned solely on the Chinese Communist Party: The practice of punishing whoever brings embarrassing truths has been the order of the day since at least the time of Confucius, in the sixth century B.C.

The sage took a page from an even more ancient tract, “The Classic of Poetry” (also known as “The Book of Songs”), a collection of songs and poems dating to the 10th century B.C. or before, and adopted a rule from it: “To Manifest the Way, First Keep Your Body Safe.” (明哲保身) That may sound innocuous enough, until you consider the fate of one of Confucius’s beloved students, Zi Lu (子路), also known as Zhong You (仲由), after he ran afoul of the precept: For trying to rebuke a usurper in a power struggle between feudal lords, he was killed and his body was minced. (It is said that Confucius never ate ground meat again.)

In the third century, the maxim took on some literary flair and a cynical didactic twist in an essay on fate by the philosopher Li Kang (李康): “The tree that grows taller than the forest will be truncated by gales” (木秀于林，風必催之). This, in turn, eventually gave rise to the more familiar modern adage, “The shot hits the bird that pokes its head out” (槍打出頭鳥).

Admittedly, China’s rulers occasionally solicit honest views from their subjects — but only of a certain kind or usually for a limited time. Mao Zedong, in his “Hundred Flowers” or “Big Voices, Big Gripes” (大鳴大放) campaign of late 1956 and early 1957, called for the facts and critical opinions to be freely proffered. A few months later came the Anti-Rightist Movement (反右運動) — during which hundreds of thousands of educated people who had spoken out were sent to jail, forced into exile or subjected to years of mistreatment, their careers and families destroyed.

Punishing people who speak the truth has been a standard practice of China’s ruling elite for more than two millenniums and is an established means of coercing stability. It is not an invention of modern China under the Communists — although the party, true to form, has perfected the practice. And now, muzzling the messenger has helped spread the deadly COVID-19, which has infected some 75,000 people.

A second cultural factor behind the epidemic are traditional Chinese beliefs about the powers of certain foods, which have encouraged some hazardous habits. There is, in particular, the aspect of Chinese eating culture known as “jinbu,” (進補) meaning, roughly, to fill the void. Some of its practices are folklorish or esoteric, but even among Chinese people who don’t follow them, the concept is pervasive.

It is better to cure a disease with food than medicine, so starts the holistic theory. Illnesses result when the body is depleted of blood and energy — though not the kind of blood and energy studied in biology and physics, but a mystic version.

Chinese police with items seized from a store suspected of trafficking exotic meats in Guangde, central China, last month.Credit...Anti-Poaching Special Squad, via Associated Press

For men, it is most important to fill the energy void, which is related to virility and sexual prowess; for women, the stress is on replacing blood, which improves beauty and fertility. Rare plants and animals from the wild are thought to bring the best replenishment, especially when eaten fresh or raw. Winter is said to be the season when the body needs more “jinbu” foods. (Could that help explain why both SARS and the current epidemic broke out during that time of year?)

Hard-core believers in “jinbu” seem to buy into this notion, too: “Like-shapes eaten strengthen like-shapes” (以形補形), with the word “shapes” sometimes referring to human organs and their functions. Adherents count as favorites a long list of exotic foods — whose methods of procurement or preparation can be outright cruel, with some simply too revolting to describe here.

I’ve seen snakes and the penises of bulls or horses — great for men, the theory goes — on offer at restaurants in many cities in southern China. Bats, which are thought to be the original source of both the current coronavirus and the SARS virus, are said to be good for restoring eyesight — especially the animals’ granular feces, called “sands of nocturnal shine” (夜明砂). Gallbladders and bile harvested from live bears are good for treating jaundice; tiger bone is for erections.

More mundane yet no less popular is the palm civet (果子狸), a small, wild quadruped suspected of having passed on the SARS virus to humans. When stewed with snake meat, it is said to cure insomnia.

Less wealthy people might turn to dog meat — preferably a dog that has been chased around before being slaughtered, because some people believe that more “jinbu” benefits are reaped from eating an animal whose blood and energy ran high. Similarly, it is thought that animals killed just before serving are more “jinbu” potent, which is one reason the more exotic offerings in wet markets tend to be sold alive — also making them more potent vectors for any virus they might carry.

Eating exotic wildlife has long been endorsed by scholars and elevated to mystical heights, including in the medical treatise “The Inner Bible of the Yellow Emperor” (黃帝内經), written some 2,000 years ago and still revered by many health-conscious Chinese today. Beliefs surrounding the health benefits of certain wildlife foods — which are discussed in newspaper columns and on numerous dedicated internet sites, as well as taught in China’s medical schools — permeate the culture.

True, these practices are not legion across China. Nor are they uniquely Chinese: Many peoples in many other countries eat exotic foods, too. But what is notable about China is that these beliefs about the special powers of some foods have been accepted, are now a given, even among people who do not put them into practice. They have become firmly embedded in the Chinese collective consciousness.

And so there are strong reasons to say that the current outbreak of COVID-19 has been aided by two fundamentally Chinese cultural practices. This may be discomfiting to hear; the notion might even strike some people as offensive. But it is necessary to investigate all the causes behind this deadly epidemic, whatever their nature — because if we don’t, we will only be inviting the next one.

Yi-Zheng Lian, a commentator on Hong Kong and Asian affairs, is a professor of economics at Yamanashi Gakuin University in Japan and a contributing Opinion writer.

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A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 23, 2020, Section SR, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: The Coronavirus and ‘Jinbu’ Foods. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe