3 ms·
There has been speculation I've overheard that the virus is particularly deadly to Asian people. Seems like a bogus theory to me, but I suspect that was the re
by war1025 7y ago
There has been speculation I've overheard that the virus is particularly deadly to Asian people.
Seems like a bogus theory to me, but I suspect that was the reason for the question.
Largely plays into the "escaped bioweapon" theory.
- rolph 7y agothere is a basis for the recombinant selection of specificity to histocompatability type [in simple terms that can mean race] I have a gut feeling it would be impossible to contain or manage the media if this virus or any other pathogen was killing only those of asian heritage so we would know if it actually was happening. There is no indication any one particular ethnic group is hit harder at this time as there is no adequate comparison between the asian and other than asian people
- knzhou 7y agoThis is a great example of how misinformation spreads. All of the speculation comes from a single non peer reviewed paper, which had literally one data point. That paper was posted to a preprint server where scientists could comment on it. And the first comment was somebody doing a quick followup study with 100x more data, which found no significant difference. Source: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.26.919985v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.26.919985v1
- allovernow 7y agoWhat you're saying isn't entirely untrue, but there has also been at least one other paper from about 10 years ago floating around which, following SARS, looked at genetic markers for ACE2 receptors and found that they are significantly overrepresented in Han Chinese and Japanese genes. So there is still some credibility to the speculation.
- rolph 7y agothis preprint needs a pass with occams chainsaw to get rid of some loaded terms that verbally modify the data