9 ms·

As far as I'm concerned it's largely irrelevant, because the real question is how the governments all handled the Covid crisis, once it was out in the open.

drclau 5y ago
I wouldn't go as far as to say it's completely irrelevant. If it was a leak, we will want guarantees that another leak is not possible (ie. better safety, or downright stop dangerous research, such as gain of function). It's all about reducing risks.
- zamalek 5y ago
  So: assume that a leak can happen all the time, find out how, and fix it. Red team/blue team your virus lab. This blamelaying is complete nonsense, and is a huge waste of funds across multiple regions.
  - _-david-_ 5y ago
    You have to know who is to blame in order to know how it escaped. If we don't know how this leak happened we can't fix it.
ChemSpider 5y ago
Not really. Once thing the lab leak theory would explain is that why the virus was so unexpectedly infective right from the start (adapted to human tissue e. g. via passage in humanized mice). In that sense, I hope that it was a lab leak. It will be better for us humans.
- scotty79 5y ago
  There's nothing unique about covid spreading to humans. It infects various species very easily. Cats, dogs, ferrets. It wasn't uniquely adapted to humans in the beginning. Humans are just more connected species than for example panthers. As it grew to pandemic levels it spawned mutations slightly more adapted to humans.
  - forcry 5y ago
    >It wasn't uniquely adapted to humans in the beginning. Seems wrong. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-92388-5#Abs1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-92388-5#Abs1 >Conspicuously, we found that the binding of the SARS-CoV-2 S protein was higher for human ACE2 than any other species we tested, with the ACE2 binding energy order, from highest to lowest, being human > pangolin > dog > monkey > hamster > ferret > cat > tiger > bat > civet > horse > cow > snake > mouse. >>These findings show that the earliest known SARS-CoV-2 isolates were surprisingly well adapted to bind strongly to human ACE2, helping explain its efficient human to human respiratory transmission.
    - scotty79 5y ago
      "Overall, given the high binding energy of S protein for pangolin ACE2, the possibility of pangolins being an intermediary vector for SARS-CoV-2 cannot be excluded" There's really no wonder that virus that spreads through human population is slightly better adjusted to humans than animal species its ancestor was infecting. It's the case of water in the puddle surprised how well the puddle shape fits the water shape. What I'm saying is that this virus is sufficiently general that it can infect multiple species with high efficiency and if hamsters were more densly connected than humans it could have been a hamster pandemic before it would become human pandemic. This virus fits us well but not uniquely well.
      - forcry 5y ago
        >There's really no wonder that virus that spreads through human population is slightly better adjusted to humans than animal species its ancestor was infecting. This does not make sense to me, because I think the COVID virus was pretty stable for a long time (being an RNA virus and all that, I don't know). So the idea is that it was optimally adapted during the time of the jump to humans (of course it could have got the perfect mutation right at the time of the jump, but the chances of that happening is astronomically small), and the optimal human transmission was not acquired later when it started circulating in humans. So the only way to have this happened is if it was optimized in a GoF research in a lab.
- aliasEli 5y ago
  This is simply the result of natural selection, there are tons of viruses that are less infectious, but they simply die out.
  - vcavallo 5y ago
    It had this quality seemingly out of the gate, not after a period of selection. that’s part of the problem.
    - aliasEli 5y ago
      The mechanism that duplicate the virus genome is fairly imprecise, which means that they produce an astronomical number of mutants. The only mutants that we will really notice are the ones that survive. There is nothing sinister about the fact that the very first COVID virus was already adapted to humans because otherwise it would never have been to infect humans.
- jpeloquin 5y ago
  > Once thing the lab leak theory would explain is that why the virus was so unexpectedly infective right from the start. There's nothing unexpected about Covid being infective because spread in humans is why we took note of it and are currently discussing it. That is, we're discussing P(human infectiousness | human epidemic). If we _randomly selected_ a virus from amongst _all_ viruses, then yes, P(human infectiousness) would be expected to be low, but we're not doing that. The former is plain selection bias (by which I mean the technical error; I'm not accusing you of bias).
rhino369 5y ago
I struggle to understand this thinking. If (and I don’t know) this was a leak of a gain-of-function modified virus, it’s a scientific experiment that killed 10 million people. We need to know so we don’t do it again. I’m not concerned about whether the car driver was drunk, I’m more concerned about how the paramedics responded to the crash.
- Synaesthesia 5y ago
  Well I don't think we will ever uncover the truth about the origin of the outbreak, I'm interested in the fact that China (seemingly) and East Asia managed to contain the virus, in Europe their was initially a huge outbreak, then some level of containment, and in the US and Americas there was a huge outbreak with no respite. That's three different responses to the same thing.

drclau 5y ago

I wouldn't go as far as to say it's completely irrelevant. If it was a leak, we will want guarantees that another leak is not possible (ie. better safety, or downright stop dangerous research, such as gain of function). It's all about reducing risks.

zamalek 5y ago
So: assume that a leak can happen all the time, find out how, and fix it. Red team/blue team your virus lab. This blamelaying is complete nonsense, and is a huge waste of funds across multiple regions.
- _-david-_ 5y ago
  You have to know who is to blame in order to know how it escaped. If we don't know how this leak happened we can't fix it.

ChemSpider 5y ago

Not really. Once thing the lab leak theory would explain is that why the virus was so unexpectedly infective right from the start (adapted to human tissue e. g. via passage in humanized mice). In that sense, I hope that it was a lab leak. It will be better for us humans.

scotty79 5y ago
There's nothing unique about covid spreading to humans. It infects various species very easily. Cats, dogs, ferrets. It wasn't uniquely adapted to humans in the beginning. Humans are just more connected species than for example panthers. As it grew to pandemic levels it spawned mutations slightly more adapted to humans.
- forcry 5y ago
  >It wasn't uniquely adapted to humans in the beginning. Seems wrong. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-92388-5#Abs1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-92388-5#Abs1 >Conspicuously, we found that the binding of the SARS-CoV-2 S protein was higher for human ACE2 than any other species we tested, with the ACE2 binding energy order, from highest to lowest, being human > pangolin > dog > monkey > hamster > ferret > cat > tiger > bat > civet > horse > cow > snake > mouse. >>These findings show that the earliest known SARS-CoV-2 isolates were surprisingly well adapted to bind strongly to human ACE2, helping explain its efficient human to human respiratory transmission.
  - scotty79 5y ago
    "Overall, given the high binding energy of S protein for pangolin ACE2, the possibility of pangolins being an intermediary vector for SARS-CoV-2 cannot be excluded" There's really no wonder that virus that spreads through human population is slightly better adjusted to humans than animal species its ancestor was infecting. It's the case of water in the puddle surprised how well the puddle shape fits the water shape. What I'm saying is that this virus is sufficiently general that it can infect multiple species with high efficiency and if hamsters were more densly connected than humans it could have been a hamster pandemic before it would become human pandemic. This virus fits us well but not uniquely well.
    - forcry 5y ago
      >There's really no wonder that virus that spreads through human population is slightly better adjusted to humans than animal species its ancestor was infecting. This does not make sense to me, because I think the COVID virus was pretty stable for a long time (being an RNA virus and all that, I don't know). So the idea is that it was optimally adapted during the time of the jump to humans (of course it could have got the perfect mutation right at the time of the jump, but the chances of that happening is astronomically small), and the optimal human transmission was not acquired later when it started circulating in humans. So the only way to have this happened is if it was optimized in a GoF research in a lab.
aliasEli 5y ago
This is simply the result of natural selection, there are tons of viruses that are less infectious, but they simply die out.
- vcavallo 5y ago
  It had this quality seemingly out of the gate, not after a period of selection. that’s part of the problem.
  - aliasEli 5y ago
    The mechanism that duplicate the virus genome is fairly imprecise, which means that they produce an astronomical number of mutants. The only mutants that we will really notice are the ones that survive. There is nothing sinister about the fact that the very first COVID virus was already adapted to humans because otherwise it would never have been to infect humans.
jpeloquin 5y ago
> Once thing the lab leak theory would explain is that why the virus was so unexpectedly infective right from the start. There's nothing unexpected about Covid being infective because spread in humans is why we took note of it and are currently discussing it. That is, we're discussing P(human infectiousness | human epidemic). If we _randomly selected_ a virus from amongst _all_ viruses, then yes, P(human infectiousness) would be expected to be low, but we're not doing that. The former is plain selection bias (by which I mean the technical error; I'm not accusing you of bias).

rhino369 5y ago

I struggle to understand this thinking. If (and I don’t know) this was a leak of a gain-of-function modified virus, it’s a scientific experiment that killed 10 million people. We need to know so we don’t do it again. I’m not concerned about whether the car driver was drunk, I’m more concerned about how the paramedics responded to the crash.

Synaesthesia 5y ago
Well I don't think we will ever uncover the truth about the origin of the outbreak, I'm interested in the fact that China (seemingly) and East Asia managed to contain the virus, in Europe their was initially a huge outbreak, then some level of containment, and in the US and Americas there was a huge outbreak with no respite. That's three different responses to the same thing.