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New coronavirus can spread between humans, but started in a wildlife market

nationalgeographic.com

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Re: New coronavirus can spread between humans, but started in a wildlife market

#301

Post by anonsivalley652 »

This strikes of subtle provincial pearl-clutching, nationalism and racist dog-whistling.

Large-scale meat agriculture and aquafarming are far worse in terms of risks of pandemic evolution:

- hundreds to tens of thousands of animals crammed into cages or pens

- all of their bodily wastes mixed together and mixed with the animals and humans taking care of them.

Orders-of-maginitudes more pandemics are just one of the negative consequences of billions of people eating meat. That has to stop, not just for the climate change reasons, but pandemic, antibiotic resistance and cruelty just to name a few.

Re: New coronavirus can spread between humans, but started in a wildlife market

#302

Post by anonsivalley652 »

nneonneo wrote: post #169
jeffdavis wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that contradict the idea that a similar virus was found and then modifed in the lab?

So...the Wuhan scientists are modifying viruses in their BSL-4 lab (which is no joke when it comes to safety standards) and then just letting these things escape? Sorry, that’s very far fetched. Why can’t people accept that a virus like this could evolve naturally?

Define "naturally"

Without human intention: yes.

Without repeated patterns of humans activity: no.

If meat agriculture, and meat-eating in general, were almost nonexistent, the risks of evolving a pandemic would be several orders-of-magnitude lower than exist today.

Re: New coronavirus can spread between humans, but started in a wildlife market

#303

Post by _byed »

dang wrote: post #288
_byed wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you keep suggesting racism here? Bigotry is the word, but if the food source isn't endangered (some bats are, some aren't) (edit: or produced cruelly, to your point), and if the education exists to safely prepare the food (e.g. cook it thoroughly to avoid pathogens), there's no real reason to dissuade routine consumption other than cultural biases or "ew that's gross," which frankly is the same thing. On the o…

Can you please stop now? It's just repeating itself, and we don't need more flamewar about bat eating.

Please delete (not [dead]) my comments on this thread.

Re: New coronavirus can spread between humans, but started in a wildlife market

#304

Post by p1necone »

daodedickinson wrote: post #283
cjbprime wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might be confused about "bats being eaten". A theory on SARS is that it was spread by bats eating fruit, leaving guano on it, civets eat the guano-laced fruit, people eat the civets. Just because bats are an important part of the vector doesn't mean that people are eating them directly. I haven't seen anyone claim, for example, that live bats were actually sold at the Wuhan wet markets. But civets are, il…

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7927747/Asian-man-d...

The daily mail is not a reliable source. Especially not for anything involving foreigners.

Re: New coronavirus can spread between humans, but started in a wildlife market

#305

Post by mrb »

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #235
mrb wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, we need better data. But tunesmith was downplaying numbers with unsourced claims, so he needed to be corrected. The latest stats: 54 deaths out of 1764 cases → 3.1% mortality rate https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/01/the-latest-coronavirus...

All things considered, it's highly likely that there are more unreported cases than unreported deaths, which means that the actual mortality rate is lower. What we need is stats on cured vs died for confirmed cases, but I haven't seen recent figures on that for a while, plus there's an inevitable delay on declaring somebody cured.

«it's highly likely that there are more unreported cases than unreported deaths, which means that the actual mortality rate is lower.»

I don't think so, because deaths lag infections. When the outbreak is rapidly growing, if it takes about 5 days for the virus to kill, then even if you knew all the stats perfectly, you actually need to look at the ratio of "deaths as of day D" over "infections as of D-5" to calculate the mortality rate. If you do this math right now (291 infections as of Jan 20, 56 deaths as of Jan 25) you find the mortality rate is 19%. Assuming infections are underreported by a factor of 5, the mortality rate is still high at 19/5 = 3.8%.

Re: New coronavirus can spread between humans, but started in a wildlife market

#306

Post by simonswords82 »

suifbwish wrote: post #8
zbjornson wrote: post #2

I'm amazed that there's not a movement to stop eating and being around animals as much world-wide, given that so much disease (and environmental damage) comes from consumption of and proximity to animals: - MERS-CoV: bats via dromedary camels - nCoV-2019: bats or snakes? - Influenza: pigs, birds - E. coli O157:H7: cows and other farm animals. ... (Edit: I mean along the lines of how safer sex is encouraged to prevent…

Actually, I see a much greater risk being around other humans. It’s why I don’t live near a major city and work from home. There is a chance that a virus from an animal might mutate to be human communicable but literally every virus from a human is already human communicable. People see it as somehow natural to live in a city of millions of people and then we are viewing animals as the greatest threat?

You genuinely chose where to live on the basis that living in remote proximity to other humans could perhaps lower your chance of catching an illness from them?

Re: New coronavirus can spread between humans, but started in a wildlife market

#307

Post by cannabis_sam »

sdiw wrote: post #21

From what I've read it came from bats. Most probably bats being eaten.[1] Bats have been the source of at least 4 pandemics. It's interesting to note that current coronavirus spreading in China and the SARS outbreak of 2003 have two things in common: Both are from the coronavirus family, and both were passed from animals to humans in a wet market.[2] I tried to put together a page for coronavirus in China here where…

Here’s the research claiming that SARS jumped from horseshoe bats to civets to humans:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1236580/

Re: New coronavirus can spread between humans, but started in a wildlife market

#308

Post by aaron695 »

Fomite wrote: post #218
jamesblonde wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just looking again - Imperial College are saying 2.6. But Neil Ferguson, part of that study from ICL, says on Twitter "we need to plan for the possibility that containment of this epidemic is not possible". https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1221134886825873409/ph...

Okay...a few notes on R0. 1) Neil Ferguson knows his business, but part of that is knowing that, like economists predicting recessions, there's little penalty for being wrong. I'm sure you can find a quote that's similar from him for any recent outbreak. Why? Because of course we need to plan for that possibility . It's a low risk statement to make. 2) R0 is not a biological constant . It's a combination of contact r…

I think the correct answer is Eric Ding is a typical Twitter user. Nutty.

https://mobile.twitter.com/ferrisjabr/status/122096355391127...

> Neil Ferguson knows his business, but part of that is knowing that, like economists predicting recessions, there's little penalty for being wrong

No. Do you think Nate wasn't penalised for his take on the 2016 US election?

Re: New coronavirus can spread between humans, but started in a wildlife market

#309

Post by Natsu »

sloppycee wrote: post #284
Aperocky wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm bordering on conspiracy theory territory here Yes. All of the initial cases are people who have been to a specific seafood market, which also sells wild animals. You would be suggesting that somehow Biosafety Laboratory dropped it's virus specifically in that market, which sold animals known to naturally carry the coronavirus. I call bs based on principal: Simple explanation is almost always right over complex…

> Simple explanation is almost always right over complex ones. What's more likely? An amazing coincidence: - The origin of this novel disease is 20 miles from a research lab. - The research lab is actively studying zoonotic viruses. - The genome suggests a ~10 years lineage from the closest bat coronavirus (96% identical). This strain of Bat coronavirus has gone under the radar for that long? - Despite the numerous m…

To be fair, it might have been first identified there because there was a lab equipped to isolate it, but I don't really know. I mean, China has had a problem with things like fake eggs, so who knows?

Its DNA seems to have been sequenced and made available online. If it's anything that has obviously been tampered with by a lab, I expect someone to point that out sooner or later. That said, I have no idea what sort of thing could be detected in the first place.

Re: New coronavirus can spread between humans, but started in a wildlife market

#310

Post by Scea91 »

adrr wrote: post #156
ComputerGuru wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dying at a high rate doesn’t matter if they do so quickly. That’s why Ebola has failed to become a global pandemic: it’s too potent and kills hosts before they have a chance to infect enough others.

Ebola is also not airborne it’s spread by bodily fluids. You can’t get it from someone coughing. People flew on planes infected with Ebola and didn’t spread it. It was overhyped by the media. In 1st world nations, it had no means to really spread like cholera.

Ebola was also contained because of tremendous effort of many people, often risking their own lives. Thanks to them you now have the luxury to call it overhyped.
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