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China is not "hyper-urbanised". There is still a good 30% rural population a lot of which live close to very dense forests with questionable sanitation. I don'

China is not "hyper-urbanised". There is still a good 30% rural population a lot of which live close to very dense forests with questionable sanitation. I don't understand how those viruses being rare in humans and outbreaks fading is actually making it harder to find them. If anything it is easier because then they don't have to figure out if humans gave it to them or they gave it to humans.

rich_sasha 4y ago
Wuhan itself is 12 million people, 1,500 km^2 according to Wikipedia. I don't know but I'm guessing there is far less opportunities for coming up close with all sorts of wildlife. Id also guess the manpower that went into searching for the SARS2 predecessor far exceeds the efforts that went into sampling animals in African rainforest.
- sudosysgen 4y ago
  The zoonotic theory is that the infected animals came from exactly the places where there is a lot of wildlife and were shipped to Wuhan (which is basically the point of wet markets). There might have been more manpower looking for the SARS-2 predecessor but, unlike with Ebola, there isn't any guarantee it still exists in a recognizable form, and in intermediate hosts you have the issue of human-animal transmission.
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    Yeah, at this point it is impossible to determine any intermediate host unless you have lucky backdated samples in a freezer someplace. And I'm still skeptical that bats gave it directly to intermediate animals who gave it to people in a nice linear fashion. Humans going into mines (like the Mojiang miners) or bat guano farming could have become infected and given it to farmed animals that they were around first, and the pandemic could be the result of spillback once the virus got good at infecting humans (not needing to be particularly good at infecting the farmed animals because of massively crowded conditions).

rich_sasha 4y ago

Wuhan itself is 12 million people, 1,500 km^2 according to Wikipedia. I don't know but I'm guessing there is far less opportunities for coming up close with all sorts of wildlife. Id also guess the manpower that went into searching for the SARS2 predecessor far exceeds the efforts that went into sampling animals in African rainforest.

sudosysgen 4y ago
The zoonotic theory is that the infected animals came from exactly the places where there is a lot of wildlife and were shipped to Wuhan (which is basically the point of wet markets). There might have been more manpower looking for the SARS-2 predecessor but, unlike with Ebola, there isn't any guarantee it still exists in a recognizable form, and in intermediate hosts you have the issue of human-animal transmission.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  Yeah, at this point it is impossible to determine any intermediate host unless you have lucky backdated samples in a freezer someplace. And I'm still skeptical that bats gave it directly to intermediate animals who gave it to people in a nice linear fashion. Humans going into mines (like the Mojiang miners) or bat guano farming could have become infected and given it to farmed animals that they were around first, and the pandemic could be the result of spillback once the virus got good at infecting humans (not needing to be particularly good at infecting the farmed animals because of massively crowded conditions).