In this age of conspiracy theories, we shouldn't be even slightly surprised that the unprecedented reaction to a virus that was declassified as an HCID back on March 19th., has generated so many questions as to what is going on, and why.
Huge chunks of the world's economies have experienced shut-down with entire populations placed in lock-down, and the the freedom of association and ability to even cross the street, is now at the discretion of law enforcement. All this with barely a whimper from our banner waving anti-establishment liberals and socialists.
If that's not worthy of a decent conspiracy theory, then nothing is.
So what's happened, what could have caused such global insanity over a nasty cold that is hastening the demise of those already sick and vulnerable with a few (but highly publicized) exceptions?
Firstly, the virus is either natural or engineered, and, if manufactured for whatever reason, it either escaped or was released into the general population. Note also that 'natural' in this context also includes what many of us regard as decidedly unnatural, culinary customs.
The options:
A deliberate release must be the greatest stretch of plausibility, what could anyone hope to gain from such an outrage, and how could they hope to evade discovery or control the spread and consequences? This idea, is a complete non-starter for me.
An accidental release from a research lab or some other bio-technological operation is possible, and the resulting attempts at cover up allowed the spread to go unchecked, and this is the preferred theory among many observers, but there's another possibility.
A naturally occurring new strain of the Coronavirus, possibly caused by bringing animal carriers into unhygienic food markets where they lived in close contact with humans and other food animals, is the least conspiratorial and also most likely in my view.
But how did this develop into the situation that the world finds itself in today?
Here is where conspiracy meets its match, for the word that nobody wants to hear, and the word that rarely means what it says, is coincidence.
What? You say, there's no such thing as coincidence in matters like these. But there is, and this may be it.
Consider the reaction in Wuhan Institute of Virology to news that local people were dying with an unrecognisable viral infection, and they undoubtedly would have known. As the first BSL-4 laboratory built in mainland China, they should have had strict procedures in place for monitoring and containment in the event of an accidental release from any of their sites (one of which is only 280 meters from the now infamous seafood market. Suspecting the worst (an outbreak of something deadly and traceable to them), they responded as only a communist state could - lockdown, police and soldiers on the streets, reporting restrictions; the whole 9 yards.
Tragedy and farce seldom travel apart, and as the virus spread, so the Chinese 'method' of containment became the norm, and once copied in Italy, itself a destination hub for countless Chinese workers, this became the accepted way, demanded by many whose real intention is to sow fear and division among their own populace, to destroy our economies (for the furtherance of socialism and the good of the planet), and to generally make life difficult for ordinary hard working people.
And there we have it, like a bonfire next to a dynamite factory, one simple coincidence and the world struggles to prevent economic meltdown. Not the most dramatic theory, but the most likely, for now at least.
