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They sterilized the market as a containment protocol for SARS-CoV-2, which eliminated the evidence. With SARS-1 the market was still fully operating when they

They sterilized the market as a containment protocol for SARS-CoV-2, which eliminated the evidence. With SARS-1 the market was still fully operating when they went looking for the origins. Once the human pandemic kicks off and you find some civets or whatever with the virus, then how do you prove they had it before the humans unless you have lucky lab samples drawn from civets who were infected prior to Dec 2019? You'd need to do something like find civit-adapted SARS-CoV-2 which could be genetically dated to prior to Dec 2019 because there were simply too many mutations to have been backspill from the human pandemic. If the spread in civets started very shortly before the spread in humans then that would likely not be possible at this point. If you could find a virus in civets that was 5 years of genetic drift away from SARS-CoV-2 that would probably work, but that may never have existed. What remains is finding the persistent bat reservoir.

tripletao 4y ago
A civet (assuming hypothetically that's the intermediate host for SARS-CoV-2) infected before Dec 2019 would provide strong genomic evidence of forward zoonosis. A civet infected afterward could still provide that evidence though, if it's by a zoonotic lineage distinguishable from the one that spilled over into humans (if such a lineage exists; you're of course correct it's not guaranteed to). For now that's all academic though, since we've found zero animals infected by any lineage of SARS-CoV-2, excluding animals that we're quite confident were infected directly or indirectly by humans, from the timing, circumstances, and genomic evidence. I don't think your scenario is impossible, and the traders themselves also had good incentive to hide or dispose of suspect animals before anyone could swab them. There's inherently no direct evidence for it, though. It seems like most arguments over the origin of SARS-CoV-2 eventually reduce to arguments over what the Chinese government has concealed, whether deliberately or accidentally as part of their containment protocol. That makes the argument hard to resolve, though there's still considerable unexplored evidence within reach of American or European subpoena, like a search through all available raw sequencer reads between September and December 2019 for contamination from SARS-CoV-2 or related viruses.

tripletao 4y ago

A civet (assuming hypothetically that's the intermediate host for SARS-CoV-2) infected before Dec 2019 would provide strong genomic evidence of forward zoonosis. A civet infected afterward could still provide that evidence though, if it's by a zoonotic lineage distinguishable from the one that spilled over into humans (if such a lineage exists; you're of course correct it's not guaranteed to). For now that's all academic though, since we've found zero animals infected by any lineage of SARS-CoV-2, excluding animals that we're quite confident were infected directly or indirectly by humans, from the timing, circumstances, and genomic evidence. I don't think your scenario is impossible, and the traders themselves also had good incentive to hide or dispose of suspect animals before anyone could swab them. There's inherently no direct evidence for it, though. It seems like most arguments over the origin of SARS-CoV-2 eventually reduce to arguments over what the Chinese government has concealed, whether deliberately or accidentally as part of their containment protocol. That makes the argument hard to resolve, though there's still considerable unexplored evidence within reach of American or European subpoena, like a search through all available raw sequencer reads between September and December 2019 for contamination from SARS-CoV-2 or related viruses.