For centuries there have been epidemics. These viral or bacterial outbreaks killed massive chunks of the world population. The first ever epidemic started in 1890, the flu outbreak. Just some time after the Second World War there was a very deadly outbreak. The name of the illness that caused it was the Spanish Flu. Things like hygiene, management and knowledge were so poor, that although many people got infected practically everywhere, nobody knew where it originated from. Its name is not called the ‘Spanish’ because it is from Spain, but rather because Spain was the first country to talk openly about it. Some people predicted that there will be epidemics in the future including Bill Gates. Since Januari a new virus has been breaking news. It is spreading to other countries from the infected countries the whole time. It is also known as the
mysterious coronavirus. Its real name is not the coronavirus, but N-COVID 2019. It is part of the many coronaviruses that exist everywhere. The other coronaviruses are mainly not harmful and only cause coughing. This new kind of coronavirus is very much lethal, but as almost all of the fatalities caused by the virus are to elderly or people that already were sick or had weak immune systems to protect them, statistically it is not that dangerous. It is more deadly than the flu, but really not as deadly as Ebola, the Spanish Flu or smallpox for the people infected. As of February 2020 almost 80,000 people are infected. Mainly in Wuhan, the epicenter of the virus and Hubei. The exact place where the virus had first emerged is unclear, but most sources say it started all on a market in Wuhan because of infected bats. This is not for sure, but it is not impossible. Bats are known to be carriers of illnesses for a very long time. Apparently, the sick Chinese do not stay home when they are sick because they spread The virus to lots of countries like America, Australia, Iran, Turkey, Belgium, Germany, Japan, South Korea and more countries. When that one ill person does after all decide to go a country after being sick and the person infects people there, that person is eligible. There is also the fact that many people do not even know that they have the coronavirus and those people are the most dangerous. Why? Because they do not take extra hygiene precautions, travel unrestrictedly and can come in contact with lost of people in a very short period, practically everywhere. The first case is known since at least 31 December 2019. In only a couple of days has the number of infected people grown exponentially. The government of China could have taken lots of very simple and cheap measures in the begin of the outbreak to completely isolate the first few people that got contaminated. The problem is that they did not do that on time resulting in a quick spread of the virus that is expected to contaminate billions of people. New viruses do not just pop into existence, they have evolved from bits of DNA or RNA that “escaped” from the genes of a larger organism. The escaped DNA could have been originated from plasm these pieces of DNA that can move between cells or molecules of DNA that replicate and move around to different positions within the genes of the cell. This happens all the time and most of the times the result is genetic trash. Sometimes, this shuffle causes the virus to be very contagious and deadly under humans. So by definition, there are no truly new viruses, there are only evolved ones. Preventing new viruses from being made is very much impossible right now and it probably will stay like that in the future. That should not be the goal, the goal should instead be to prevent further spread. If the prevention system fails in the future and there is a dangerous germ, then due to the large population and the big overall population density the earth would see the biggest epidemic ever with lots of casualties. After all, prevention is better than cure.
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These are some of the sources I have been using to write this post:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/world/asia/china-coronavirus.amp.html?0p19G=0038