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It is believed that some of the cases (all?) didnt have any contact with minks and therefore was human-to-human
Source?
This is one of the serious dangers with the idea of letting the virus run wild to achieve herd immunity: you create a lot of animal reservoirs. Though minks do seek way riskier than average.
Why are minks riskier than average? Is it because of biological similarity (but then, there are lots of other mammals), or because of the conditions they're kept in? Naively, I might have just expected that cows or pigs or sheep would be the highest risks in aggregate, just because of numbers.
As a dane I'm not really proud that these things were here to being with
What does it mean that the virus responds weakly to antibodies? Were these antibodies produced before against the unmutated virus? Or is it that humans have a harder time forming effective antibodies against this new variant.
Country loses, corporation loses, citizens lose if that's the case.
If they just cull the minks, only the minks lose.
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1. Yes. This is serious. Mutation is a big red reset button on the pandemic potentially. 2. No. Minks are kept in small cages with a very high density of biomass. This makes it a perfect incubator. Also ferrets have some similarities with humans in the upper respiratory system, making this more of a concern.
Not only that, the conditions of keeping the animals close but not too close even encourages selection for mutations that allow the virus to spread more easily through air. If I remember correctly, ferrets were held under similiar conditions for "gain for function" experiments [0]. "Gain of function" means here how the virus can develop the ability (function) of spreading through the air when it e.g. initially requir…
“Gain of Function” is often a dog whistle for bioweapons research.
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I completely agree with your first paragraph, but humans > minks by literally any measure.
This is a bit self-referential. 'Humans are the best therefore human measures are the best therefore humans are the best' [Caged] minks probably don't think that humans > minks by any measure that they value.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only that, the conditions of keeping the animals close but not too close even encourages selection for mutations that allow the virus to spread more easily through air. If I remember correctly, ferrets were held under similiar conditions for "gain for function" experiments [0]. "Gain of function" means here how the virus can develop the ability (function) of spreading through the air when it e.g. initially requir…
Banned in the US, but presumably outsourced to wherever else the research funding flowed to?
That's horrible, and how can anyone find that ok. Per "Guns, Germs, and Steel", it's not even strategic, because diversification of existing strains should naturally select the least deadly, as well as spread antibodies across species boundaries.
This only works for diseases where symptoms and being contagious are concurrent. In the case of Covid-19 we know that humans can be contagious without experiencing negative symptoms. The potentially fatal symptoms appear later on.
The danger with that is that there is no reason for evolutionary processes to favor a less deadly strain as the disease has a window to spread before it starts damaging you. The evolutionary pressure towards being less deadly only happens because a disease that kills people too fast doesn't have time to spread as far as a less lethal strain.
In the case of Covid the disease could easily evolve the opposite direction: to be 100% fatal after two weeks of non-symptomatic contagion. It would still be able to spread just fine using its initial two week period, so there would be little to no evolutionary pressure toward lower fatality rates.
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Why do we have to compare it? Multiple things can be terrible and require changes.
The issue is very much analogous. Lots of pigs getting culled (in many cases burned and/or buried alive on a grand scale) because they are infected with diseases that are dangerous to humans. Corona included. I just keep being surprised that there is consensus forming around mink but the hog issue, which is very similar and actually a bigger problem by numbers, is not really part of the mainstream debate. For some re…
It's easy to not care about people not getting mink coats. Much harder to care about people having food taken out of their mouths by people who think they have a right to dictate that sort of thing. If you think eating pork should be forbidden, I've got a part of the world to introduce you to.