581–590 of 868 posts
No natural reservoir of covid has been found. Ergo it's not natural.
I've never seen a polar bear. Ergo they don't exist.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The closest natural relative origin of SARS-CoV-2 was in Yunnan ~700 miles away from the market. The Wuhan lab collected samples from that area and the lab is only ~10 miles away from the market. Those wet markets are huge vectors for a viral spread, so a virus being spread there doesn't necessarily mean it started there. Why that market in Hubei and not first at a market closer to Yunnan? It might be more profitable…
> The closest The closest _known_. The second closest was found in Laos, also 700 miles from Wuhan (BANAL-52). Except it's in the other direction. So we know that close cousins of CoV-2 are pretty wide-spread. > Those wet markets are huge vectors for a viral spread, so a virus being spread there doesn't necessarily mean it started there The thing is, does it really matter? We can say with a high degree of confidence…
What? You're aware that Yunnan literally shares a border with Laos?
If we actually care about public health, we should act as if both the lab leak and zoonosis theories are correct. We should take laboratory biosecurity, wet markets, the bush meat trade and intensive livestock management equally seriously as threats. We should do this because we have no idea where the next pandemic - and there will be a next pandemic - will come from. It seems fairly clear to me that a lot of people…
The problem is that the two theories can have competing indications as to how to prepare. Specifically: should we do gain of function research, or is that foolish — depends on how you read what happened in 2020.
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I'm confused, do you mean the animal origin had no evidence either, but was favoured? But not having evidence for 5 years suddenly makes the other theory favoured instead? So basically neither had real evidence, but one was favoured?
False equivalence. Zoonotic diseases have precedent (SARS, MERS) and SARS-CoV-2 most closely resembles BANAL-52, a bat Coronavirus. Animal origin still seems more likely to me, but less than 5 years ago, since we have a missing link one would expect to see.
There was no evidence for a zoonotic origin other than it was possible.
There was little evidence for a lab leak other than it was possible, but at least there was some.
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I have family that have worked on developing NBC equipment for the military. The first thing they said when covid was spreading was that it was most likely from a lab. That was before anyone in the news was saying that. So an independent first-look assessment by someone with experience, followed by later finding out that there was in fact a lab there, has me heavily leaning towards it being true. But it doesn't reall…
If SARS-Cov-2 was from a lab, what about the original SARS? Generally though, China is somewhat better suited to producing pandemics, because they have a larger and more dense population within which a disease can spread.
And MERS. It’s not like coronaviruses causing epidemics were very surprising at the time.
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No, the academic papers that were published strongly pointed to the origin being the market and from wild animals, not lab animals.
You are being downvoted, but you are right. Evidence suggest that patient zero was someone in the Wuhan market, around november 2019, and the SARS-CoV-2 genetic "signatures" where all found in wild animals for sale in that market. Even if it leaked from the lab, the first affected people (mainly sellers) were from the market, which is weird. Occam's razor points to what you said. I guess everyone loves a good conspir…
https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(24)00901-2.pdf
It found that viral RNA and DNA from potential zoonotic hosts (palm civets, raccoon dogs) occurred together in some samples from the Huanan Seafood Market. But there's no question that infected humans were present there, and nothing in their study can distinguish an infected palm civet from a healthy palm civet near an infected human.
A different study by Jesse Bloom found that of all the animals present, viral RNA correlated most strongly with DNA from "catfish and largemouth bass":
https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/9/2/vead050/7249794
So were those the proximal hosts? Obviously not, since SARS-CoV-2 can't infect fish--the point is that this is all just noise. Live, unquestionably infected proximal hosts were found for both SARS-1 and MERS, within about a year of the first human cases. For SARS-CoV-2, we still have nothing beyond those tortured metagenomics.
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Right. "Low confidence". Read [1] People who deal with intel data need to work with possibly wrong info. Most spy novels don't get this. Real military planning works more like: "Intel says the enemy is at A or B, most likely at A. How much resources should we devote to A vs B, or hold in reserve until we find out by encountering the enemy? What's our plan if we guess wrong?" Planning has to assume that intel might be…
It’s also important to weight dramatic changes in the White House this week, too, right? There’s the intel itself, but then there’s also the guy trying to control the news cycle.
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If you followed events at the time and the suppressed rumours from doctors in China end of 2019, the new illness began exactly around that area actually ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang etc). There were no similar reports in another place on this planet. (Since 99% of other places do not have full control of media and many have better healthcare so if it happened it would be less likely to go unnoticed)
>no similar reports Covid detected in wastewater samples December 2019 in Italy: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7428442/ >November 2019 in Brazil: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.26.20140731v... They found covid in samples of the sewage system in SC state Brazil in November. 2 months before it came out of wuhan https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/saude/novo-coronavirus-ja-estav... >March 2019 i…
November Brazil could happen because December is when rumours already circulated in China and October is when it was out in Wuhan already per your link.
April Brazil I don't know what to tell you, no sources support the wild claim that it was NOT a data error.
> 2 months before it came out of wuhan
Source? I bet it came out earlier. It was circulating in Wuhan before the pandemic according to WHO. Just people in China who are more likely to get infected are less likely to travel abroad (social class/sanitary conditions/etc) but maybe one person brought it out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the academic papers that were published strongly pointed to the origin being the market and from wild animals, not lab animals.
You are being downvoted, but you are right. Evidence suggest that patient zero was someone in the Wuhan market, around november 2019, and the SARS-CoV-2 genetic "signatures" where all found in wild animals for sale in that market. Even if it leaked from the lab, the first affected people (mainly sellers) were from the market, which is weird. Occam's razor points to what you said. I guess everyone loves a good conspir…