5 ms·

Well its been years, why haven't they found the reservoir yet then? They would obviously want to since it would prove that it wasn't a lab leak, yet as far as I

Well its been years, why haven't they found the reservoir yet then? They would obviously want to since it would prove that it wasn't a lab leak, yet as far as I know they haven't claimed to have found it yet.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
yibg 4y ago
Maybe because they are not easy to find? How long did it take to find SARS reservoir?
- weaksauce 4y ago
  looked it up and it seems they found the source of SARS from 2002-2004 in 2017 so a bit over a decade.
  - baja_blast 4y ago
    Not true, it took them a few months. In this paper published in 2003: > "Civet cats, a raccoon dog, and a ferret badger in an animal market in Gunagdong, China, were infected with a coronavirus identical to the one that causes SARS in humans save for an extra 29-nucleotide sequence" which demonstrated that these animals had a very close ancestral virus circulating within their populations. Source: https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs. You're mistaking ancestral origin with proximal origin. It took a decade to find the bat virus that infected the civet cats, but the intermediate host responsible for the spillover was found within months.
  - stolsvik 4y ago
    Source?
thamer 4y ago
One argument against the cross-species transmission theory is that Chinese horseshoe bats (the reservoir for SARS and possibly SARS-CoV-2) don't really live in Wuhan. They live mainly in the south of China, see for example this map[1] from the paper "Bat Coronaviruses in China"[2]. This is where SARS was found in the wild, and where it first emerged as an epidemic[3]. It's not impossible that it would emerge in bats in Wuhan and spread to animals and then humans from there, just not very likely. Of course we know very little about the start of this pandemic so it's possible that an animal was infected in the south and transported to Wuhan, but that would mean that it happened without producing cases along the way. [1] https://www.mdpi.com/viruses/viruses-11-00210/article_deploy/html/images/viruses-11-00210-g001.png https://www.mdpi.com/viruses/viruses-11-00210/article_deploy... [2] https://doi.org/10.3390/v11030210 https://doi.org/10.3390/v11030210 [3] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1118391 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1118391
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  They absolutely live in Wuhan, or at very least, 60 miles away from Wuhan. https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002326/how-chinas-bat-caves-hold-the-secret-to-preventing-epidemics https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002326/how-chinas-bat-caves-... We have a huge sampling error problem since SARS clearly came from Yunnan, so much of the research and characterization focus has been in the South -- but bats and bat coronaviruses are endemic to all of China. Hence the caution on relying on this type of thought-process to make sweeping conclusions. E.g, just "ctrl+F" for Hubei in this paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7106260/pdf/main.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7106260/pdf/mai...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

yibg 4y ago

Maybe because they are not easy to find? How long did it take to find SARS reservoir?

weaksauce 4y ago
looked it up and it seems they found the source of SARS from 2002-2004 in 2017 so a bit over a decade.
- baja_blast 4y ago
  Not true, it took them a few months. In this paper published in 2003: > "Civet cats, a raccoon dog, and a ferret badger in an animal market in Gunagdong, China, were infected with a coronavirus identical to the one that causes SARS in humans save for an extra 29-nucleotide sequence" which demonstrated that these animals had a very close ancestral virus circulating within their populations. Source: https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs. You're mistaking ancestral origin with proximal origin. It took a decade to find the bat virus that infected the civet cats, but the intermediate host responsible for the spillover was found within months.
- stolsvik 4y ago
  Source?

thamer 4y ago

One argument against the cross-species transmission theory is that Chinese horseshoe bats (the reservoir for SARS and possibly SARS-CoV-2) don't really live in Wuhan. They live mainly in the south of China, see for example this map[1] from the paper "Bat Coronaviruses in China"[2]. This is where SARS was found in the wild, and where it first emerged as an epidemic[3]. It's not impossible that it would emerge in bats in Wuhan and spread to animals and then humans from there, just not very likely. Of course we know very little about the start of this pandemic so it's possible that an animal was infected in the south and transported to Wuhan, but that would mean that it happened without producing cases along the way. [1] https://www.mdpi.com/viruses/viruses-11-00210/article_deploy/html/images/viruses-11-00210-g001.png https://www.mdpi.com/viruses/viruses-11-00210/article_deploy... [2] https://doi.org/10.3390/v11030210 https://doi.org/10.3390/v11030210 [3] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1118391 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1118391

mikeyouse 4y ago
They absolutely live in Wuhan, or at very least, 60 miles away from Wuhan. https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002326/how-chinas-bat-caves-hold-the-secret-to-preventing-epidemics https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002326/how-chinas-bat-caves-... We have a huge sampling error problem since SARS clearly came from Yunnan, so much of the research and characterization focus has been in the South -- but bats and bat coronaviruses are endemic to all of China. Hence the caution on relying on this type of thought-process to make sweeping conclusions. E.g, just "ctrl+F" for Hubei in this paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7106260/pdf/main.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7106260/pdf/mai...