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Considering how many animal pool reservoirs there are it seems pretty likely that this variant came from such a reservoir and then hopped back into the human po

• natch 5y ago
  Absolutely sounds plausible, but it seems odd to leave out another competing reasonable theory if the intent is to survey the various theories. Certainly they know stuff I don’t, though.
  • jjulius 5y ago
    >Absolutely sounds plausible, but it seems odd to leave out another competing reasonable theory if the intent is to survey the various theories. To be fair, even the article suggests that "whichever idea a researcher favours 'often comes down to gut feeling rather than any sort of principled argument'", that "they are all fair game" and "everyone has their favourite hypothesis." So there are a lot of reasonable theories out there; at what point do they stop adding other theories to the article without upsetting someone that certain theories were ommitted? >Certainly they know stuff I don’t, though. Maybe that's why they had the "gall" to not mention it?
    • natch 5y ago
      > Maybe that's why they had the "gall" to not mention it? Maybe. Could be other reasons as well, like circling the wagons to protect their preferred work approaches and their colleagues. It’s not like this isn’t a known phenomenon in virology.
• 22c 5y ago
  > then hopped back into the human population How likely is that? Do you think Omicron got very lucky, or are we just very lucky that (if the animal reservoir theory is correct) it only happened with Omicron?
• natch 5y ago
  Somehow doing so without the expected number of silent mutations. Off by an order of magnitude. Yeah not sure how that could happen.