Conversation

Kinda interesting that the century of American globalization and the century of Chinese globalization both have a pandemic about 25 years in. I’d date the former to the 1893 Chicago world fair, and the latter to the death of Deng Xiaoping, 1997.
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Our time also has climate change, and we’ve already had one climate-related pandemic. It just wasn’t among humans. It was among Saiga deer. Adjacent possible warning. Covid19 has no climate angle that I can see, but the risk of climate change and pandemic risk combing is there.
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Don’t want to overstate/over fit the US origin of Spanish Flu theory. It’s not critical to the pattern. The bigger part is that the waxing global power supplies the new transportation network the disease rides, whatever the origin.
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Replying to @vgr
This is just one narrative amidst the research, and one that tends to be selected not b/c people want truth, but b/c they want a memetically potent take. After looking at the diff studies, my $ is on those that point to China, though it’s unlikely we’ll ever know definitively.
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In fact there’s a strong possibility all 3 big pandemivs (Black Death, Spanish Flu, Covid19) might have originated in China. But this is the first one where China *also* controls half the transportation pathways. Direct airline connectivity to China was the big dispersal factor.
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Counterfactual: if the virus had originated elsewhere, I bet the early dispersal hub would still likely have been China.
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