The photo has nothing to do with any disease. This is a beaching of many thousands of tiny Velella vellella. They can grow to be a few inches long, but these are as small as the head of a pin.

I posted a few days ago about my friend who, years ago, was accidentally infected by bluetongue, a disease she was studying in sheep. She insisted that she could not possibly have the disease, but that she certainly had the antibodies in her blood. The disease of cloven-hoofed mammals, was not supposed to infect humans at all. But it did.

Not that it matters all that much to most of us just now where covid19 originated, but it seems that deliberate release has been ruled out, but an accidental one has not. Pangolins apparently have little to no part in this disease—it’s bats. Covid19 is derived from a coronavirus infecting bats. Here’s the catch: there were no bats in the seafood market where the disease supposedly first appeared. A wild bat might have infected someone in the market, of course, but more troubling is that nearby was a lab studying coronavirus in bats. Again, there is absolutely no one (outside of the wackjob conspiracy theorists) who believes it was released deliberately on human populations. It’s more likely someone was either very unlucky or simply careless.

“Richard Ebright, a Rutgers microbiologist and biosafety expert, told me in an email that ‘the first human infection could have occurred as a natural accident,’ with the virus passing from bat to human, possibly through another animal. But Ebright cautioned that it ‘also could have occurred as a laboratory accident, with, for example, an accidental infection of a laboratory worker.’ He noted that bat coronaviruses were studied in Wuhan at Biosafety Level 2, ‘which provides only minimal protection,’ compared with the top BSL-4.” —The Washington Post, 2 April 2020

With over a quarter of a million Americans already diagnosed with covid19, having a look at how this started is going to matter in the future if we have any hope of surviving a repeat. (A reminder the the great influenza pandemic of 1918-19, the so-called “Spanish Flu,” was not from Spain and may have started in Kansas. Troop movements spread it all over the world. According to the CDC: “It is estimated that about 500 million people or one-third of the world’s population became infected with this virus. The number of deaths was estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide with about 675,000 occurring in the United States.”)

source: “How Did Covid-19 Begin? Its Initial Origin Story Is Suspect” by David Ignatius

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/how-did-covid-19-begin-its-initial-origin-story-is-shaky/2020/04/02/1475d488-7521-11ea-87da-77a8136c1a6d_story.html?