Chinese Coronavirus a Disease of Civilisation By Chris Knight

     The coronavirus is a disease of globalisation, argues Yale University historian of pandemics, Frank Snowdon in an interview published in the Wall Street Journal, something which we here fully endorse, and have been in fact saying for some time. Globalisation, globalises disease, leading to civilizational breakdown:
  https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/03/29/coronavirus-globalization-historian/
  http://archive.is/WJn3p

“The coronavirus is threatening “the economic and political sinews of globalization, and causing them to unravel to a certain degree,” Mr. Snowden says. He notes that “coronavirus is emphatically a disease of globalization.” The virus is striking hardest in cities that are “densely populated and linked by rapid air travel, by movements of tourists, of refugees, all kinds of businesspeople, all kinds of interlocking networks.” Respiratory viruses, Mr. Snowden says, tend to be socially indiscriminate in whom they infect. Yet because of its origins in the vectors of globalization, the coronavirus appears to have affected the elite in a high-profile way. From Tom Hanks to Boris Johnson, people who travel frequently or are in touch with travelers have been among the first to get infected. That has shaped the political response in the U.S., as the Democratic Party, centered in globalized cities, demands an intensive response. Liberal professionals may also be more likely to be able to work while isolated at home. Republican voters are less likely to live in dense areas with high numbers of infections and so far appear less receptive to dramatic countermeasures. … Coronavirus is far less lethal, but it does shatter assumptions about the resilience of the modern world. Mr. Snowden says that after World War II “there was real confidence that all infectious disease were going to be a thing of the past.” Chronic and hereditary diseases would remain, but “the infections, the contagions, the pandemics, would no longer exist because of science.” Since the 1990s—in particular the avian flu outbreak of 1997—experts have understood that “there are going to be many more epidemic diseases,” especially respiratory infections that jump from animals to humans. Nonetheless, the novel coronavirus caught the West flat-footed. It’s too early to say what political and economic imprint this pandemic will leave in its wake. As Mr. Snowden says, “there’s much more that isn’t known than is known.” Yet with a mix of intuition and luck, Renaissance Europeans often kept at bay a gruesome plague whose provenance and mechanisms they didn’t understand. Today science is capable of much more. But modernity has also left our societies vulnerable in ways 14th-century Venetians could never have imagined.”

     Nothing that we have not said, but good to hear some of these thoughts from another source.