5 ms·

Why it matters where COVID came from

41 points by apsec112 6y ago

Nbox9 6y ago
The virus most likely came from close contact between animals and humans in which humans wanted to consume the animal. Virtually all of the new infectious diseases come from animal to human transmissions, and virtually all of those come from either direct consumption of animals or from animal agriculture. The total number of animals kept for agricultural purposes, plus the conditions they are kept in, means we can expect more and more diseases to come from this industry. Shifting our food sources away from industrial animal agriculture would significantly decrease the number of new infectious diseases we have to encounter. This looks like lab grown meat, like plant based meat substitutes such as Impossible, Beyond, and Oatly, like grass fed beef, like backyard chickens, and it looks like less beef burritos and more bean burritos.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  It would not be the first time nature is blamed for human activity, so I am not sure what makes you so sure. Two separate papers have come out saying pretty much the same thing, that there is lots of evidence pointing to this virus being more likely engineered (by modifying existing viruses) and that each piece of evidence also matches papers put out by researchers working at the Wuhan-based virus research lab, which is also where the outbreak is thought to have begun.
  - SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
    The problem is though that a lot more dangerous (than Covid) pathogen, Influenza A H5N1 is waiting to jump from chicken on people, which is only possible if people come into close contact with poultry. It has happened with Pig Flu. Influenza by far is most dangerous pathogen around, it had shown what it is capable of in 1918, and it may happen again.
Spooky23 6y ago
Original content: https://twitter.com/JeffLadish/status/1306775734598250496 https://twitter.com/JeffLadish/status/1306775734598250496 Threadreaderapp is silly.
- firloop 6y ago
  Normally I’d agree, but in this case Twitter abruptly ended the thread, hiding it behind a click to ask me if I wanted Covid-19 info and show me tangentially related content. https://imgur.com/a/LPXeSb4 https://imgur.com/a/LPXeSb4
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    Twitter is amazing — it’s a company that exists in spite of itself.
phobosanomaly 6y ago
At this point, I think learning how to manage a pandemic without destroying the economy is the only question we should care about. Pandemics will keep showing up regardless of if they're engineered or natural. It may be a 100% antibiotic-resistant bacteria next time, or some weird prion thing no-one thought about before, or the T-virus, or whatever's floating in the atmosphere of Venus. Who knows. If we learn to correct what we're doing right now, then even if this happens again from a completely novel threat vector we didn't anticipate, we can handle it quickly and effectively.
- tfigment 6y ago
  I sort of agree. You right that is pragmatic but we do still need to manage it to minimize its effects. Economic leaders can focus on managing the economy and science and medical communities can focus on the outbreak and hopefully the politicians stay in their corner and not overrule everything trying to get reelected.
- zdragnar 6y ago
  I am not entirely sure that we would learn those lessons from dealing with covid-19. Much of the policy around it has been with the assumption that a vaccine could be produced in a somewhat reasonable time line, and we just need to hold out a bit longer. The genome was sequenced increadibly quickly, and much of the vaccine work is based on all of the research that went into dealing with SARS 20 or so years ago. A pandemic caused by something completely novel- whether a contageous and infectious prion disease (does that even make sense?) Or T-virus or venus flu- means that there will be far greater uncertainty than what we have been dealing with. A vaccine wouldn't even make sense in the case of a pandemic prion disease. I think that Sweden had the right of things, but as others have pointed out before (and likely will again) it is still too early to tell. Not only that, but complicating matters is that every country captures statistics differently- especially the US and UK versus Europe. Numbers get bandied about quite a bit, and I suspect it will be many years before cool heads can evaluate all of the confounding factors into what actually helped and what we should do in the future.
  - phobosanomaly 6y ago
dusted 6y ago
I know a doctor who works at multiple hospitals, she have talked about how there are a lot more infections and strange ones, in the rural population, things that jump from animals, that she never sees in the urban population. Maybe there's just a general problem with hygiene ?
- aerostable_slug 6y ago
  > things that jump from animals My physician father was involved with a case where a drunken idiot decided to go play on a beach filled with elephant seals. The deep tusk wound he earned in one thigh had the local internists hitting the books to figure out what rare and exotic marine bugs had infected the fellow... IIRC the guy lived, but he was very ill. Sometimes I wonder if he lives on in textbook case studies (with the requisite black bars over his eyes in any photos).
jerome-jh 6y ago
I am probably begging for downvotes, but here is a reasoning I came about recently. Virus mutations are not rare events. This is what supports the natural evolution/selection/mutation of a wild virus into Sar-cov-2 hypothesis. People often say that the "natural hypothesis" is far more likely than a virus escaping a BSL4 lab. Let's look at that. According to Wikipedia, there have been 3 virus outbreaks in "wet markets" in the last 20 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_market#Health_concerns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_market#Health_concerns). That makes about 1 outbreak in 7 years. That's for China as a whole. China is big. The probability of having a virus outbreak in a particular town is of course somewhat lower. The particular town we are looking at is Wuhan: this is the only city in China having a BSL4 lab, and it did gain of function experiments on Coronaviruses. There are 108 towns with more than 1m population (https://all-populations.com/en/cn/list-of-cities-in-china-by-population.html https://all-populations.com/en/cn/list-of-cities-in-china-by...). We're going to make rough estimates: let's say there are 100 "wet markets" in China, about one per city >1m. That makes the probability for a natural virus outbreak in _a_given_ "wet market" to be 1 in 700 years. The question to be answered is this one: what is the most likely event between: 1/ a natural virus outbreak at Wuhan's "wet market" 2/ a modified virus "escaping" Wuhan's BSL4 lab Hypothesis 1 has been estimated at 1 in 700 years. Do you believe the probability of hypothesis 2/ to be much lower than 1/? Would the probability of hypothesis 1/ be 1 in 100 years, would you still thing it is much bigger than hypothesis 2/?
- elp 6y ago
  "Biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) is the highest level of biosafety precautions" A real escape seems pretty unlikely. If it was deliberate why release it in China why not somewhere else? If it had to be in China for some magical reason then why not test on say the Uighurs? Also add in things like Ebola and Hiv probably being linked to bushmeat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushmeat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushmeat), Small pox, the bubonic plague plus a bunch of others from rodents. Outside of better evidence the "escape" theory belongs to B-Grade Netflix movies and conspiracy websites.
  - Fjolsvith 6y ago
    Did time in federal prison. Some of the guys at one facility got the plague because they burned dirt from the yard to make tattoo ink.
stunt 6y ago
Pandemic response was really chaotic. So much conflicting information from politicians instead of relying on scientist and healthcare system to take care of what message must be delivered about COVID19. Often just pure speculation instead of proper emergency communication.

41 points by apsec112 6y ago

The virus most likely came from close contact between animals and humans in which humans wanted to consume the animal. Virtually all of the new infectious diseases come from animal to human transmissions, and virtually all of those come from either direct consumption of animals or from animal agriculture. The total number of animals kept for agricultural purposes, plus the conditions they are kept in, means we can expect more and more diseases to come from this industry. Shifting our food sources away from industrial animal agriculture would significantly decrease the number of new infectious diseases we have to encounter. This looks like lab grown meat, like plant based meat substitutes such as Impossible, Beyond, and Oatly, like grass fed beef, like backyard chickens, and it looks like less beef burritos and more bean burritos.

forgotmypw17 6y ago
It would not be the first time nature is blamed for human activity, so I am not sure what makes you so sure. Two separate papers have come out saying pretty much the same thing, that there is lots of evidence pointing to this virus being more likely engineered (by modifying existing viruses) and that each piece of evidence also matches papers put out by researchers working at the Wuhan-based virus research lab, which is also where the outbreak is thought to have begun.
- SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
  The problem is though that a lot more dangerous (than Covid) pathogen, Influenza A H5N1 is waiting to jump from chicken on people, which is only possible if people come into close contact with poultry. It has happened with Pig Flu. Influenza by far is most dangerous pathogen around, it had shown what it is capable of in 1918, and it may happen again.

Spooky23 6y ago

Original content: https://twitter.com/JeffLadish/status/1306775734598250496 https://twitter.com/JeffLadish/status/1306775734598250496 Threadreaderapp is silly.

firloop 6y ago
Normally I’d agree, but in this case Twitter abruptly ended the thread, hiding it behind a click to ask me if I wanted Covid-19 info and show me tangentially related content. https://imgur.com/a/LPXeSb4 https://imgur.com/a/LPXeSb4
- Spooky23 6y ago
  Twitter is amazing — it’s a company that exists in spite of itself.

phobosanomaly 6y ago

At this point, I think learning how to manage a pandemic without destroying the economy is the only question we should care about. Pandemics will keep showing up regardless of if they're engineered or natural. It may be a 100% antibiotic-resistant bacteria next time, or some weird prion thing no-one thought about before, or the T-virus, or whatever's floating in the atmosphere of Venus. Who knows. If we learn to correct what we're doing right now, then even if this happens again from a completely novel threat vector we didn't anticipate, we can handle it quickly and effectively.

tfigment 6y ago
I sort of agree. You right that is pragmatic but we do still need to manage it to minimize its effects. Economic leaders can focus on managing the economy and science and medical communities can focus on the outbreak and hopefully the politicians stay in their corner and not overrule everything trying to get reelected.
zdragnar 6y ago
I am not entirely sure that we would learn those lessons from dealing with covid-19. Much of the policy around it has been with the assumption that a vaccine could be produced in a somewhat reasonable time line, and we just need to hold out a bit longer. The genome was sequenced increadibly quickly, and much of the vaccine work is based on all of the research that went into dealing with SARS 20 or so years ago. A pandemic caused by something completely novel- whether a contageous and infectious prion disease (does that even make sense?) Or T-virus or venus flu- means that there will be far greater uncertainty than what we have been dealing with. A vaccine wouldn't even make sense in the case of a pandemic prion disease. I think that Sweden had the right of things, but as others have pointed out before (and likely will again) it is still too early to tell. Not only that, but complicating matters is that every country captures statistics differently- especially the US and UK versus Europe. Numbers get bandied about quite a bit, and I suspect it will be many years before cool heads can evaluate all of the confounding factors into what actually helped and what we should do in the future.
- phobosanomaly 6y ago

dusted 6y ago

I know a doctor who works at multiple hospitals, she have talked about how there are a lot more infections and strange ones, in the rural population, things that jump from animals, that she never sees in the urban population. Maybe there's just a general problem with hygiene ?

aerostable_slug 6y ago
> things that jump from animals My physician father was involved with a case where a drunken idiot decided to go play on a beach filled with elephant seals. The deep tusk wound he earned in one thigh had the local internists hitting the books to figure out what rare and exotic marine bugs had infected the fellow... IIRC the guy lived, but he was very ill. Sometimes I wonder if he lives on in textbook case studies (with the requisite black bars over his eyes in any photos).

jerome-jh 6y ago

I am probably begging for downvotes, but here is a reasoning I came about recently. Virus mutations are not rare events. This is what supports the natural evolution/selection/mutation of a wild virus into Sar-cov-2 hypothesis. People often say that the "natural hypothesis" is far more likely than a virus escaping a BSL4 lab. Let's look at that. According to Wikipedia, there have been 3 virus outbreaks in "wet markets" in the last 20 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_market#Health_concerns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_market#Health_concerns). That makes about 1 outbreak in 7 years. That's for China as a whole. China is big. The probability of having a virus outbreak in a particular town is of course somewhat lower. The particular town we are looking at is Wuhan: this is the only city in China having a BSL4 lab, and it did gain of function experiments on Coronaviruses. There are 108 towns with more than 1m population (https://all-populations.com/en/cn/list-of-cities-in-china-by-population.html https://all-populations.com/en/cn/list-of-cities-in-china-by...). We're going to make rough estimates: let's say there are 100 "wet markets" in China, about one per city >1m. That makes the probability for a natural virus outbreak in _a_given_ "wet market" to be 1 in 700 years. The question to be answered is this one: what is the most likely event between: 1/ a natural virus outbreak at Wuhan's "wet market" 2/ a modified virus "escaping" Wuhan's BSL4 lab Hypothesis 1 has been estimated at 1 in 700 years. Do you believe the probability of hypothesis 2/ to be much lower than 1/? Would the probability of hypothesis 1/ be 1 in 100 years, would you still thing it is much bigger than hypothesis 2/?

elp 6y ago
"Biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) is the highest level of biosafety precautions" A real escape seems pretty unlikely. If it was deliberate why release it in China why not somewhere else? If it had to be in China for some magical reason then why not test on say the Uighurs? Also add in things like Ebola and Hiv probably being linked to bushmeat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushmeat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushmeat), Small pox, the bubonic plague plus a bunch of others from rodents. Outside of better evidence the "escape" theory belongs to B-Grade Netflix movies and conspiracy websites.
- Fjolsvith 6y ago
  Did time in federal prison. Some of the guys at one facility got the plague because they burned dirt from the yard to make tattoo ink.

stunt 6y ago

Pandemic response was really chaotic. So much conflicting information from politicians instead of relying on scientist and healthcare system to take care of what message must be delivered about COVID19. Often just pure speculation instead of proper emergency communication.