It's the unclean and close-quarters keeping of many animal species that's the issue, not their 'wild' status so much.
Yeah, cages stacked on cages with feces and food and other secretions mixing in a big dumb petri dish is the problem.
The known cases in the US is closing in on 170k as I type this.
We're still only testing obvious symptomatic patients for the most part, it's hard to find negative test results though they are of critical importance when it comes to estimating what sort of measures need to be taken, so it's a good thing the agencies responsible for tracking this information and providing it are... *touches ear* uh huh... uh huh... FUCKING WHAT... shit... ok, well, yeah, remember when that one website stopped providing negative testing numbers because it might make the administration look bad? Apparently that was THE website which is supposed to do this.
Ideally we'd know about ~170k cases and have done nearly 2 million tests, but it's completely possible we've inverted those numbers and only gotten 15~20k negative test results.
It did surpass 9/11 in death toll at some point yesterday... though I must point out that is just
confirmed deaths due to COVID-19
so far.Whenever we end up with a better idea of the excess mortality rate[n] we can realistically attribute to this, you could write a book on how to not handle a pandemic and call it "n Hidden 9/11's: How
NOT to Handle a Pandemic" if it isn't something horrifying like 100 or more implying ~290k extra deaths which is unfortunately not a possibility we can readily dismiss.
It's actually even more surreal watching this trainwreck happen with the direct memory of how utterly bizarre that morning 19 years ago was, I didn't approve of anything dubya was doing really, but I never felt such a gaping void of anything resembling leadership as we do right now.
I mean, I knew we had fallen pretty goddamn far with all the republican bullshit prior to Trump, but I guess the constant low level crisis of his presidency in general made it easy to overlook just how calm everything really was and how lucky he has been the whole time that no real crisis popped up because he is so much less than we needed it's hard to be properly scared.
You can't overreact to a pandemic, btw, because overreaction looks like the handful of countries that jumped on this shit and locked it down, and the only way that is incorrect is if for some strange reason the virus had burned itself out weeks ago... but it's never the wrong choice.
We, here in the USA, are a case study on why you only ever regret underreacting to shit like this, don't be like us, for fuck's sake.