They're not talking about squirrels with coronavirus. They mean real bubonic plague. Just great. https://nypost.com/2020/07/13/squirrel-tests-positive-for-plague-in-colorado/
It’s strange that it’s being sensationalized. Any rodent whether it is a squirrel, rat, rabbit, ground hog etc can carry infected fleas and as a matter of fact, the U.S. has an average of 11 or so cases of plague infected humans each year and Russia has a couple of thousand cases each year. China, dunno. They found 1 infected rodent of some sort last week and it made all the news media. The thing they’re not saying is that if person is infected and it is caught early, it’s treatable. One way or the other, somebody’s trying to make a bunch of agoraphobics out of the population whereby a whole mass of the population will be too afraid to walk out their front doors lest they catch something and die. Unless you’re in a riot. No one catches anything but bullets in a riot. Amazon....get ready for the onslaught!
Oh, I didn’t write that the disease is normal. It’s rare just like rabies and malaria is a rarity in the U.S. but it is normal in the sense that we know that rodents of any kind can carry the infected fleas. It’s a given that there are more rats and mice compared to any other type of rodent so it’s even more prevalent for mice and rats to be infected but that doesn’t mean that other rodents can’t be carriers. That said, just because I know that squirrels, [a rodent] can carry the source for the bubonic plague doesn’t mean I’m going to sit on my front porch and start shooting squirrels. (Note: Which, would be a bad thing anyway even if they were infected because like using mouse traps to kill mice, the fleas get knocked off and search for another host.) There are a myriad of diseases that a person can catch, but even though they are rare, just like the bubonic plague, they’re still treatable and the causes are controllable. I mean, Russia just made it illegal to hunt Marmots because it’s suspected that they carry fleas responsible for an uptick in the number of cases of the plague. It’s strange that the media isn’t carrying that news. To me, a couple dozen infected marmots in Russia is far more newsworthy than finding 1 infected rabbit (or whatever) in the whole expanse of China or even 1 squirrel in Colorado.
why would anybody even be testing a squirrel for ANYTHING, anyway ? this sounds like more fear-mongering to me. Nothing in the article even mentions why the squirrel was tested, or anything more about the squirrel.
Yeah, the Murder Hornets failed to produce the intended effect, so they're trying squirrels. Good point. That crossed my mind when I read that two cats had tested positive for COVID-19 a couple of months ago, although they suffered only mild respiratory symptoms. At that time, there weren't nearly enough testing kits available to test people, but they were testing cats. It seemed suspicious to me.
If I don't feed the squirrels around my house, they get testy. Sometimes they even bang on the windows and scold me when I go outdoors.
I read an article long ago that theorized that the origins of using garlic to ward off vampires dates back to the plague. People were dropping like flies, and no one knew why (given the [lack of] technology of the day.) But when they noticed that the garlic vendors on the street somehow seemed to be faring better than others, they surmised that garlic was warding off the evil spirits. The likely explanation for these vendors doing so well is that they snacked on their wares throughout the day, deriving a mild antibiotic benefit from eating so much garlic.