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The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

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Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#51

Post by stormbrew »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #3

We don't want to know. That may sound a bit glib but I think it's true. What would be the reaction if we could determine the outbreak was due to an unintentional leak? China cannot reimburse the world for the economic damage covid has caused. It cannot be held accountable for all the lives that have been lost. It cannot compensate the world for the diminished quality of life we've all suffered. But there will be plen…

Also, even if it was an accidental release by china the situation the world finds itself in is at least as much the US' (and much of the rest of its sphere of influence's) fault for the extremely poorly coordinated response to the situation last year. China at least did something about its domestic spread.

The US is a major global center of trade and travel, and in the end, much of the spread around the world is because there was basically no attempt to stop it from spreading through there.

All roads lead to Rome.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#52

Post by molticrystal »

thepasswordis wrote: post #24

Something which hasn't been able to be answered for me on this yet: Where are all the bats infected with this virus? It it came from a bat, it would have had to be circulating in the bat population a LOT to mutate enough to jump to humans, right? So...why not go find a bad, identify the parent virus, and close this whole thing out?

The bats , horseshoe bats, located in caves approximately a thousand kilometers away have often carried these viruses. [0] And at least 6 times since the year 2000 the collection of these bats have led to humans getting sick. It just takes some fecal matter dust.

So a very likely explanation is some low level employees grabbed some bats, got their suits and vehicles contaminated didn't clean things properly, drove down to the Wuhan laboratory, and rested in town spreading virus contaminated dust or if they were already sick, their virus filled respiration about.

No lab leak needed, just the regular practices when "Wuhan Institute of Virology in China sampled thousands of horseshoe bats in locations across the country", and those doing so were being sloppy, as they have been known to be repeatably.

[0] Bat cave solves mystery of deadly SARS virus — and suggests new outbreak could occur - December 2017 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#53

Post by FpUser »

brendoelfrendo wrote: post #46
FpUser wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if the article tells the truth? Why would author's racial preferences matter? You might be surprised how much of modern tech was developed by racists and other bad apples. If you are from the US try reading how your rocket / space industry had been developed for example.

I mean, it's directly relevant: the man regurgitates tired, bad science to justify a racist worldview. His trustworthiness in this domain is compromised.

I only care about one thing whether that virus came out as the result of aforementioned research. I could not care less about author's worldview and whether he eats babies for breakfast.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#55

Post by inciampati »

guesst wrote: post #15
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #3

We don't want to know. That may sound a bit glib but I think it's true. What would be the reaction if we could determine the outbreak was due to an unintentional leak? China cannot reimburse the world for the economic damage covid has caused. It cannot be held accountable for all the lives that have been lost. It cannot compensate the world for the diminished quality of life we've all suffered. But there will be plen…

The China aspect is probably a red herring. Gain-of-function research was internationally funded, including by the US. The perils had been pointed out for years by virologists [1], some of whom managed to get an editorial in the New York Times against it [2]. If Covid turns out to be a lab escape (which is a big if ), the nation or lab it happened in is just the proximate cause. Deeper responsibility would lie with t…

> If Covid turns out to be a lab escape (which is a big if),

It seems like we don't have evidence, but the natural evolutionary experiment that's occurred provides a staggering amount. We can see from the virus phylogeny that:

1. The virus entered the human population in October 2019. All known SARS2 sequences are related in a single clade that, under very soft assumptions about mutation rate, would coalesce in late fall 2019. The first sequences we got, in early 2020, had only a handful of mutations between them. Nothing has ever arisen outside of this clade.

2. The virus entered humans with it's spike protein already fully adapted to the human ACE receptor protein. We can see this because there was not an accelerated evolution in this protein. We did not see changes in the viral genome resulting in a significant phenotypic change until the b.1.1.7 and other "third wave" variants arose. This stands in intense contrast to every other zoonotic transfer we know of. Adaptation always occurs because biology is different enough that different viral configurations provide immediate gain, and through continuous mutation the virus is exploring a huge space of these all the time. The fact that it doesn't mutate rapidly indicates it is near a strong local optimum.

One way of understanding the significance of this is by thinking of the virus as a learned model which is learning a solution to the problem of its own survival. What this evidence shows is that is appeared already optimized. We see this because over an incredible number of update steps (many quadrillions perhaps, with each human infection being like a minibatch, and each viral replication like a step) there was no significant reduction in test loss (viral survival). We randomly picked a perfect initial model. Either that first virus was lucky in a way that is similar to guessing a perfect solution, which has a probability so low as to be fanciful, or it had already in incorporated all the readily-usa le information about the human ACE receptor.

Do we have evidence? What is the probability of this pattern occuring in the case of a natural spillover? It's 1:atoms-in-the universe level. Finding a virus already so optimized to humans by randomly sampling from existing ones is like the kind of collision probability level that we comfortably use to build cryptocurrency castles that assume key non-collision. In the case of a virus optimized by serial passage in the lab? Frankly it's indistinguishable from that.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#56

Post by alexnewman »

inciampati wrote: post #55
guesst wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The China aspect is probably a red herring. Gain-of-function research was internationally funded, including by the US. The perils had been pointed out for years by virologists [1], some of whom managed to get an editorial in the New York Times against it [2]. If Covid turns out to be a lab escape (which is a big if ), the nation or lab it happened in is just the proximate cause. Deeper responsibility would lie with t…

> If Covid turns out to be a lab escape (which is a big if), It seems like we don't have evidence, but the natural evolutionary experiment that's occurred provides a staggering amount. We can see from the virus phylogeny that: 1. The virus entered the human population in October 2019. All known SARS2 sequences are related in a single clade that, under very soft assumptions about mutation rate, would coalesce in late…

Except if china covered up that it was a lab leak for political reasons, one can argue the entire pandemic was their fault. Alas, the crime is covering it up, even if all the institutions set the safety standards. No different than any other crime. It’s like hiding a chemical fire when it’s burning down your neighbors house and then they throw water on it and make it worse.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#57

Post by zuminator »

guesst wrote: post #36
bigpumpkin wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For SARS (2003) It took 3 years to find the intermediate host (civets). And 14 years (2017) to find the bat parent of the virus[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr... Guess who found the bat host? Shi Zhengli of the very WIV in question.

That's a bit confusing because the OP makes an opposite point: "The intermediary host species of SARS1 was identified within four months of the epidemic’s outbreak, and the host of MERS within nine months."

In 2003 it was merely suspected that covers were the intermediate. It wasn't confirmed until 2006. Read further down:

"In late 2006, scientists from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention of Hong Kong University and the Guangzhou Centre for Disease Control and Prevention established a genetic link between the SARS coronavirus appearing in civets and humans, bearing out claims that the disease had jumped across species.[62]"

It goes on to state that the bat link was confirmed in 2017.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#58

Post by serial_dev »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #3

We don't want to know. That may sound a bit glib but I think it's true. What would be the reaction if we could determine the outbreak was due to an unintentional leak? China cannot reimburse the world for the economic damage covid has caused. It cannot be held accountable for all the lives that have been lost. It cannot compensate the world for the diminished quality of life we've all suffered. But there will be plen…

I get what you say, but if we ignore how things happened, it's more likely to happen again.

A similar, though obviously still very different, example that came to my mind is Chernobyl. The incident made bad reactor designs and their consequences visible to all, and in the long run, it improved nuclear reactors' safety. How would you feel that after Chernobyl, there was no research on why it happened, and people would have said "well, what's happened happened, there is no way to change that, so why investigate"?

If we never figure out (and we don't even attempt) how the virus came to be (wet market, lab accident, intentional release, eating raw exotic animal, or just a normal mutation, I don't know, I'm not an expert, but saying the options I heard so far), the same circumstances will be continue to be available, and sooner or later, another (potentially worse) pandemic will hit us.

However, as you mentioned, there are negative effects of knowing things, so I wish whenever we do find out what and how happened, nations could do a "blameless post-mortem" (in case it was unintentional).

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#59

Post by [deleted] »

kbenson wrote: post #50
guesst wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The China aspect is probably a red herring. Gain-of-function research was internationally funded, including by the US. The perils had been pointed out for years by virologists [1], some of whom managed to get an editorial in the New York Times against it [2]. If Covid turns out to be a lab escape (which is a big if ), the nation or lab it happened in is just the proximate cause. Deeper responsibility would lie with t…

> If Covid turns out to be a lab escape (which is a big if), the nation or lab it happened in is just the proximate cause. Deeper responsibility would lie with the institutions and individuals that pushed it despite the risks. That's the rational response. The fact that it can be played for political gain means it will be played for political gain, regardless of how rational it is. Look at the whole mask debacle of t…

[deleted]

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#60

Post by guesst »

inciampati wrote: post #55
guesst wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The China aspect is probably a red herring. Gain-of-function research was internationally funded, including by the US. The perils had been pointed out for years by virologists [1], some of whom managed to get an editorial in the New York Times against it [2]. If Covid turns out to be a lab escape (which is a big if ), the nation or lab it happened in is just the proximate cause. Deeper responsibility would lie with t…

> If Covid turns out to be a lab escape (which is a big if), It seems like we don't have evidence, but the natural evolutionary experiment that's occurred provides a staggering amount. We can see from the virus phylogeny that: 1. The virus entered the human population in October 2019. All known SARS2 sequences are related in a single clade that, under very soft assumptions about mutation rate, would coalesce in late…

If the evidence is that overwhelming, then why are so few researchers saying so? I can understand things being extremely skewed at the political and policy level - that's expected - and I can understand the media being skewed because I'm familiar with that on other issues. But if your argument is right then this is also basically a total collapse of the scientific community. That's harder to swallow. From your comment I assume that you're either a biologist or trained as such, so I'd like to hear how you explain that.
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