COVID19: an announced pandemic

Abstract

A severe upper respiratory tract syndrome caused by the new coronavirus has now spread to the entire world as a highly contagious pandemic. The large scale explosion of the disease is conventionally traced back to January of this year in the Chinese province of Hubei, the wet markets of the principal city of Wuhan being assumed to have been the specific causative locus of the sudden explosion of the infection. A number of findings that are now coming to light show that this interpretation of the origin and history of the pandemic is overly simplified. A number of variants of the coronavirus would in principle have had the ability to initiate the pandemic well before January of this year. However, even if the COVID-19 had become, so to say, ready, conditions in the local environment would have had to prevail to induce the loss of the biodiversity’s “dilution effect” that kept the virus under control, favoring its spillover from its bat reservoir to the human target. In the absence of these appropriate conditions only abortive attempts to initiate the pandemic could possibly occur: a number of them did indeed occur in China, and probably elsewhere as well. These conditions were unfortunately present at the wet marked in Wuhan at the end of last year.

History of the COVID-19 pandemic: Origin, explosion, worldwide spreading

“…The introduction of a founder into a highly mobile and well connected population [ 23 ] may play a significant role in the rapid spread of the infection without effects on its severity. After all, factors of this type (see above) have certainly contributed to the fact the several small outbreaks of COVID-19 infection in the last decades of last century have remained limited and controlled until a complicating event -in this case the “ amplification ” factor of Wuhan’s wet market-came into play [ 1 ].…”

“…The matter of the intermediate host in the transmission of coronaviruses from bats to humans is not settled [ 1 ]. During the SARS-CoV 2002–2003 epidemic, civet cats ( Paguma larvata) had been considered the reservoir of the virus, as it had been isolated from clinically normal animals [ 25 , 26 ].…”

“…Today, nine or ten months after the recognition that a new coronavirus had caused the sudden appearance of a large number of atypical pneumonias in Wuhan, the city is still largely considered the place of origin of the new viral disease. However, as documented in a recent contribution [ 1 ], the virus and its pathologies had been present in China well ahead of the Wuhan epidemic explosion. They had actually been active outside China as well, for instance in Europe [ 2 ].…”

The Sultan and the Soup: A Javanese Cultural Response to COVID-19

“…The first cases of COVID-19 in Indonesia were confirmed on March 2, 2020 (Burhan et al, 2020;Tosepu et al, 2020). The number of cases quickly increased, and COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic on March 12, 2020 (Platto et al, 2020;Spinelli & Pellino, 2020). Measures taken over the subsequent weeks dramatically altered people's everyday lives (Platto et al, 2020;Remuzzi & Remuzzi, 2020).…”

“…The number of cases quickly increased, and COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic on March 12, 2020 (Platto et al, 2020;Spinelli & Pellino, 2020). Measures taken over the subsequent weeks dramatically altered people's everyday lives (Platto et al, 2020;Remuzzi & Remuzzi, 2020). The world has undergone major changes and has transformed typical social practices (Dein et al, 2020;Garbe et al, 2020).…”