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I didn't mean to suggest that you were confusing anything with MERS. I just brought MERS up to show that not only had we found an animal infected with SARS-1 wi

I didn't mean to suggest that you were confusing anything with MERS. I just brought MERS up to show that not only had we found an animal infected with SARS-1 within about a year of its emergence in humans, but we'd also found such an animal for MERS, on a similar timescale. This means that SARS-CoV-2 is the 1/3 for which we haven't, not impossible just by chance but slightly more surprising than just 1/2. And yeah, you'd mentioned WIV-1 above, and I'd assumed that's what you meant from the 2013 date. I noted this in point (2) of my grandparent comment. I just don't understand why you think that's more significant than finding the near-identical virus in civets. The SARS-1 civets might not have first transmitted SARS-1 to humans, but the WIV-1 bats definitely didn't--they're very different viruses, and while WIV-1 might indeed be able to infect humans it's definitely not what caused the actual outbreak. So why pick 2013 and not 2003?

lamontcg 5y ago
We have no proof that civets gave us SARS-1 and not the other way around. Since it was also found in raccoon dogs, ferret badgers and domestic cats which one of those was the actual intermediate animal? Civets were just the first identified. Either one of them gave it to us and we gave it to the other three, or possibly we got it from bats and gave it to all four. AFAIK there's no conclusive phylogenetic analysis establishing which species got it from whom. MERS is much more obvious what happened.
- tripletao 5y ago
  I think you're strictly right there. If they'd obtained sequences then they could have built that tree; but as far as I know they didn't, perhaps because the cost of sequencing was higher back then. That's still more evidence than we have for SARS-CoV-2, though. With SARS-1 we had the additional evidence that some wildlife traders had antibodies, presumably from mild infections by related viruses in the animals they handled. There's again no genomic evidence to exclude "reverse zoonosis" there, but the timing seems to make that pretty unlikely. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1140695/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1140695/

lamontcg 5y ago

We have no proof that civets gave us SARS-1 and not the other way around. Since it was also found in raccoon dogs, ferret badgers and domestic cats which one of those was the actual intermediate animal? Civets were just the first identified. Either one of them gave it to us and we gave it to the other three, or possibly we got it from bats and gave it to all four. AFAIK there's no conclusive phylogenetic analysis establishing which species got it from whom. MERS is much more obvious what happened.

tripletao 5y ago
I think you're strictly right there. If they'd obtained sequences then they could have built that tree; but as far as I know they didn't, perhaps because the cost of sequencing was higher back then. That's still more evidence than we have for SARS-CoV-2, though. With SARS-1 we had the additional evidence that some wildlife traders had antibodies, presumably from mild infections by related viruses in the animals they handled. There's again no genomic evidence to exclude "reverse zoonosis" there, but the timing seems to make that pretty unlikely. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1140695/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1140695/