4 ms·

Here's a question I have: Given a pandemic (past, present, or future, doesn't matter) won't the causal pathogen always look like it's been impossibly "well tun

• rook166 5y ago
  I think that's probably at least somewhat true, although from the article it seems like the argument against that selection bias is that a) COVID-19 seems to be substantially more "tuned" than its cousins SARS and MERS, and b) there is as-yet no strong evidence of pre-pandemic strains of a COVID-19 progenitor (either in humans or animals).
• dkarras 5y ago
  I'm not sure if you read the article, but it has some convincing arguments about that. The gist of it is that just like the "fossil records", we'd find the "intermediary steps" or something resembling those in the nature, and we sure did with the previous problematic coronaviruses within months. No such luck with this one. Also there are arguments about how the genome of this variant was already "attuned" to the human biology in very unique ways right from the beginning which is unexpected in the "natural" scenario, but would be perfectly ok with the lab escape scenario because they either use human tissues or humanized mice. So this particular virus looks like a giant step from its predecessors (not a couple mutations here and there) but the intermediate steps are missing. It was also demonstrated, prior to the pandemic that the scientists working in the lab most likely to create this virus worked in safety settings no better than a dentist's office. There is a lot more to unpack there in the article.