It appears that COVID-19 is to have a younger sibling, this one originating in the cute little mink. Over 200 people in Denmark have fallen ill with a genotype of coronavirus that is associated with mink that are farmed there. That’s about half of Danes with coronavirus, and seems to indicate that we’ll have two viruses running amok soon.
https://news.yahoo.com/coronavirus-mink-implications-140545611.html
The new coronavirus is said (I still have nothing but a TV news mention of this) to deliver some damage to the immune system, which would mean that if you caught it and got over it, you’d be more prone to other infections including the original SARS-CoV-2 strain that engendered COVID-19.
Worse, we haven’t even managed COVID-19 yet and there’s a successor to the throne. We’re concerned about our “economies” when we should be concerned about our very survival . . .
People are going back to dangerous jobs not because they’re brave and want you to have that doublecreammocchacinoavocadosuperbulletproof or that new mink quilt and pillow manchester set – they’re going to work because big corporations and banks would rather see humans die than just use some of their obscene profits to just pay their workers or suspend loans.
People used to die in their millions for this symbol (✞) and are now dying in their millions for this one ($).
How the $$$ are causing this:
Around the world some 50 million mink a year are bred, generally for their fur, and mink are prone to coronaviruses. At this stage it appears that SARS-CoV-2 (which is a zoonotic virus after all, able to cross between species) crossed into mink and spread among them.
Mink are bred for their fur and China, Denmark, Poland, and the Netherlands are the major players in this 50,000,000 number of mink bred in captivity. High mink population densities such as exist in these mink farms make an outbreak inevitable, and fast!-spreading when such an outbreak starts. Outbreeding between farms (for the sake of keeping breeding values up) meant that wherever Ground Zero was, it spread.
Outbreaks in Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain, Denmark, and the US, show just how far it has spread . . .
Viruses mutate when they infect a new host, which is how we know it’s a new strain and can identify it. And from the fact that the virus has to have crossed the zoonotic barrier to get into the mink populstion and become mutated, and the further fact that those 200+ people now have THAT particular strain of the virus, we can see that the virus must also have the ability to freely cross back the other way from the mink to humans.
Things that make me go hmmm:
Everything to do with these outbreaks is driven by population density, and population density is a function of our rapacious hunger and breeding ability. We have doubled our population in a very short time recently, and with it comes a need for more food, more resources, more converting habitats to be more suitable for us and our resource species such as plants we eat, animals we eat or make use of (such as those mink, for their fur,) and resources we dig up to power homes, transport, manufacturing. We’re crowding – everything. A species extinction event is taking place, and there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s almost entirely driven by our hunger for resources.
The original SARS-CoV-2 passed from either bats or pangolins (depending on which theory you follow) to humans crowding into their habitats for hunting, or crowded into smaller habitats for domesticated breeding.
We’re not learning from ecosystem collapses around our millions of acres of farmland that has crowded out all the biodiversity of some regions, nor from the rapid spread of avian, bovine, swine, and other animal viruses and diseases among the crowded animals we breed.
We’re not learning from the ecosystem collapses around mining sites, nor from the inevitable toxic spills and toxic waste.
So – given that the more we see of the Earth, the more we realise that it’s a finely-tuned and – more importantly – reactive system overall, why aren’t we devoting our EVERY resource at our disposal to solving these problems?