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> It also raises eyebrows the fact that no animal has ever been found to be positive for COVID, in contrast to all of the previous SARS pandemics. This doesn't

> It also raises eyebrows the fact that no animal has ever been found to be positive for COVID, in contrast to all of the previous SARS pandemics. This doesn't really mean very much. It took something like 15 years to find the bat population likely to have been the source of SARS-CoV-1. It's not like we were able to say definitively how the spillover began; it's all probabilities. We have found similar viruses to SARS-CoV-2 floating around in pangolins and bats.

tripletao 4y ago
> It took something like 15 years to find the bat population likely to have been the source of SARS-CoV-1. This is true but misleading. It took a long time to find the reservoir host (i.e., the animal in which most of the virus evolved) for SARS-1, but the proximal host (i.e., the animal that actually infected the first humans) was found within about a year. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2004/01/who-sees-more-evidence-civet-role-sars https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2004/01/who-sees... Based on the WIV's pre-pandemic research, we knew immediately that the reservoir host of SARS-CoV-2 is bats. We still haven't found the proximal host. It's almost certainly not pangolins, and Nature eventually published an extensive correction to their pangolin paper. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.07.184374v2 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.07.184374v2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2313-x#change-history https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2313-x#change-his...
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