4 ms·
> This is the kind of contact tracing that would be expected from a lab spillover. Except that SARS-1 causes ~10x the fatality rate, and correspondingly more s
by tripletao 3y ago
> This is the kind of contact tracing that would be expected from a lab spillover.
Except that SARS-1 causes ~10x the fatality rate, and correspondingly more serious nonfatal sickness? That obviously makes contact tracing easier than for a novel virus with symptoms easily misattributed to a common cold or flu.
- lamontcg 3y agoExcept we have good contact tracing associated with the wet market and it hits people >50 years old hard, and >70 with a high fatality rate ("severe pneumonia in people over 50 years old with comorbidities" is how it was characterized at the start). So again, the infected lab worker was perfectly surrounded by healthy young people and very fit old people, except for one visit to the exact location where zoonotic spillover would have happened.
- tripletao 3y ago> except for one visit to the exact location where zoonotic spillover would have happened. You're continuing to assume no cryptic spread. The IFR is low, and the overdispersed epidemiological dynamics mean that most lineages die out. This makes it impossible to exclude many (even ten or more) generations of cryptic human-to-human spread between that hypothetical infected lab worker and the market. Even with advance warning, public health authorities in Western countries succeeded in tracing almost no cases back to the port of entry. I don't see why you'd expect the Chinese authorities to have succeeded at their much more difficult task.