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But SARS outbreak was from a single strain, wasn't it? It's not the “two zoonosis” that I find to be low-probability, it's the “two zoonosis of two different st

by shakow 2y ago

But SARS outbreak was from a single strain, wasn't it? It's not the “two zoonosis” that I find to be low-probability, it's the “two zoonosis of two different strains at the same place & time”.

mikeyouse 2y ago
The two Covid strains were closely related with only a few mutations difference between them. As you’d expect if eg two different raccoon dogs were infected with the same virus and one of the lineages was preferred.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  You would expect, as was the case with SARS, that we would then find the population of infected animals. That did not happen with COVID, and in fact when we went looking, the closest virus in a wild population was a bat coronavirus located 1000 miles away.
  - DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
    > You would expect, as was the case with SARS, that we would then find the population of infected animals. In the case of SARS, the animals were not culled for months. The entire SARS response was slow - the virus kept spreading in farmed animal populations and kept spilling over into humans. With SARS-CoV-2, the Chinese government immediately ordered all the suspect animals to be culled. No test results for those animals have ever been released, if they were ever even conducted. > the closest virus in a wild population was a bat coronavirus located 1000 miles away. Guangzhou, where the original SARS emerged, is just as far away from the bat populations and Wuhan is.
    - mikeyouse 2y ago
      And relatedly - several of the animals sold in Wuhan with proper paperwork were from farms far closer to the closest Covid ancestors including many in the same province - not to mention wherever else the off-the-books animals were being brought in from.
    - pclmulqdq 2y ago
      > In the case of SARS, the animals were not culled for months. The entire SARS response was slow - the virus kept spreading in farmed animal populations and kept spilling over into humans. It's been 4 years. When are we culling the COVID animals? The answer is that there's no culling because there's no animal population with a virus that is close enough that it could have been the basis for COVID. The closest known wild-type virus - the one in those bats from over 1000 miles away - is still missing several key features (eg furin cleavage sites) that would be exceedingly unlikely to have all evolved multiple times in the few animals that made it to the wet market. Almost every animal population that has resulted in a pandemic in the past has been pinned down in a matter of months and "dealt with." Obvious examples are SARS, MERS, and the recent influenza pandemics. That hasn't even gotten close to happening with COVID. This is a core competency of public health agencies, much more so than you might have realized. In 2020, the lab leak sounded like a conspiracy theory to me and I thought it was a matter of time until the animals were found. Now, with it clear that there is no population of animal hosts with a similar virus in a similar area (given huge databases of bat coronaviruses that were developed post-SARS), it's looking increasingly like a virus that has been through a lab IMO.
      - DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
        > It's been 4 years. When are we culling the COVID animals? The answer is that there's no culling because there's no animal population with a virus that is close enough that it could have been the basis for COVID. The animals were culled right at the beginning of the pandemic. The Chinese government immediately ordered all of the farms that raise the types of animals that caused the original SARS to cull their stock. We have never seen a sequence from any of those culled animals, either because no sequences were taken, or because the government doesn't want them to be published. In any case, culling the potential host population would have been a very effective measure for preventing the virus from spilling over again. > The closest known wild-type virus - the one in those bats from over 1000 miles away - is still missing several key features (eg furin cleavage sites) that would be exceedingly unlikely to have all evolved multiple times in the few animals that made it to the wet market. First off, the fact that the closest known virus is in bats 1000 miles away is not at all surprising. With the original SARS virus, the closest known virus in bats was also from a site about 1000 miles away from where the human outbreak started. Second, other coronaviruses have furin cleavage sites, so this is something that has evolved multiple times. Third, we're not just talking about a few infected animals. We're talking about a population of infected animals, maybe on different farms. The few that were brought to the Huanan market in Wuhan seeded the outbreak in humans, but they were part of a larger infected population. > Almost every animal population that has resulted in a pandemic in the past has been pinned down in a matter of months and "dealt with." This is not true. It took literally decades to locate the origins of AIDS. We still don't know the origins of Ebola (not a pandemic, but it has caused a series of large regional outbreaks and is the subject of intense study). There is a vast diversity of coronaviruses in bats, and the more scientists look, the more they find. > it's looking increasingly like a virus that has been through a lab IMO. Literally every piece of evidence has pointed towards the market, from epidemiology (which has firmly established that the outbreak radiated outwards from the market) to genetic evidence (multiple lineages of SARS-CoV-2 present in the very stalls where wild animals were being sold at the market).
DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
The SARS outbreak was from many zoonosis events of slightly different strains, over the course of months. The standard zoonosis theory here predicts that multiple spillover events are likely, because there's a population of infected animals that is in close contact with humans.
- shakow 2y ago
  Multiple zoonosis events from close strains over a couple months from a local animal population strikes high on the probability scale. Virtually simultaneous, in time and space, zoonosis events from different strains at the same place is still possible, but reaches much lower on the scale.
  - DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
    If both variants are spreading in the farmed animal population, it's not unlikely at all. It's what you'd expect.
    - shakow 2y ago
      If it were coming from a farm population, I would have expected the said farm to have been found pretty easily by the Chinese investigation – and they would have had no incentive to hide it, as it would have pinned covid on basically a bad luck case once and for all.
      - DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
        They identified the at-risk farms right away and ordered them to immediately cull their stocks. The Chinese government has been very sensitive about the idea that the virus came from a farm. > it would have pinned covid on basically a bad luck case once and for all. The US would still have tried to make maximum propaganda use of that. If you recall the early "wet market" discussion, it was highly accusatory, and often blatantly racist.
        2y ago

by shakow 2y ago

mikeyouse 2y ago

The two Covid strains were closely related with only a few mutations difference between them. As you’d expect if eg two different raccoon dogs were infected with the same virus and one of the lineages was preferred.

pclmulqdq 2y ago
You would expect, as was the case with SARS, that we would then find the population of infected animals. That did not happen with COVID, and in fact when we went looking, the closest virus in a wild population was a bat coronavirus located 1000 miles away.
- DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
  > You would expect, as was the case with SARS, that we would then find the population of infected animals. In the case of SARS, the animals were not culled for months. The entire SARS response was slow - the virus kept spreading in farmed animal populations and kept spilling over into humans. With SARS-CoV-2, the Chinese government immediately ordered all the suspect animals to be culled. No test results for those animals have ever been released, if they were ever even conducted. > the closest virus in a wild population was a bat coronavirus located 1000 miles away. Guangzhou, where the original SARS emerged, is just as far away from the bat populations and Wuhan is.
  - mikeyouse 2y ago
    And relatedly - several of the animals sold in Wuhan with proper paperwork were from farms far closer to the closest Covid ancestors including many in the same province - not to mention wherever else the off-the-books animals were being brought in from.
  - pclmulqdq 2y ago
    > In the case of SARS, the animals were not culled for months. The entire SARS response was slow - the virus kept spreading in farmed animal populations and kept spilling over into humans. It's been 4 years. When are we culling the COVID animals? The answer is that there's no culling because there's no animal population with a virus that is close enough that it could have been the basis for COVID. The closest known wild-type virus - the one in those bats from over 1000 miles away - is still missing several key features (eg furin cleavage sites) that would be exceedingly unlikely to have all evolved multiple times in the few animals that made it to the wet market. Almost every animal population that has resulted in a pandemic in the past has been pinned down in a matter of months and "dealt with." Obvious examples are SARS, MERS, and the recent influenza pandemics. That hasn't even gotten close to happening with COVID. This is a core competency of public health agencies, much more so than you might have realized. In 2020, the lab leak sounded like a conspiracy theory to me and I thought it was a matter of time until the animals were found. Now, with it clear that there is no population of animal hosts with a similar virus in a similar area (given huge databases of bat coronaviruses that were developed post-SARS), it's looking increasingly like a virus that has been through a lab IMO.
    - DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
      > It's been 4 years. When are we culling the COVID animals? The answer is that there's no culling because there's no animal population with a virus that is close enough that it could have been the basis for COVID. The animals were culled right at the beginning of the pandemic. The Chinese government immediately ordered all of the farms that raise the types of animals that caused the original SARS to cull their stock. We have never seen a sequence from any of those culled animals, either because no sequences were taken, or because the government doesn't want them to be published. In any case, culling the potential host population would have been a very effective measure for preventing the virus from spilling over again. > The closest known wild-type virus - the one in those bats from over 1000 miles away - is still missing several key features (eg furin cleavage sites) that would be exceedingly unlikely to have all evolved multiple times in the few animals that made it to the wet market. First off, the fact that the closest known virus is in bats 1000 miles away is not at all surprising. With the original SARS virus, the closest known virus in bats was also from a site about 1000 miles away from where the human outbreak started. Second, other coronaviruses have furin cleavage sites, so this is something that has evolved multiple times. Third, we're not just talking about a few infected animals. We're talking about a population of infected animals, maybe on different farms. The few that were brought to the Huanan market in Wuhan seeded the outbreak in humans, but they were part of a larger infected population. > Almost every animal population that has resulted in a pandemic in the past has been pinned down in a matter of months and "dealt with." This is not true. It took literally decades to locate the origins of AIDS. We still don't know the origins of Ebola (not a pandemic, but it has caused a series of large regional outbreaks and is the subject of intense study). There is a vast diversity of coronaviruses in bats, and the more scientists look, the more they find. > it's looking increasingly like a virus that has been through a lab IMO. Literally every piece of evidence has pointed towards the market, from epidemiology (which has firmly established that the outbreak radiated outwards from the market) to genetic evidence (multiple lineages of SARS-CoV-2 present in the very stalls where wild animals were being sold at the market).

DiogenesKynikos 2y ago

The SARS outbreak was from many zoonosis events of slightly different strains, over the course of months. The standard zoonosis theory here predicts that multiple spillover events are likely, because there's a population of infected animals that is in close contact with humans.

shakow 2y ago
Multiple zoonosis events from close strains over a couple months from a local animal population strikes high on the probability scale. Virtually simultaneous, in time and space, zoonosis events from different strains at the same place is still possible, but reaches much lower on the scale.
- DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
  If both variants are spreading in the farmed animal population, it's not unlikely at all. It's what you'd expect.
  - shakow 2y ago
    If it were coming from a farm population, I would have expected the said farm to have been found pretty easily by the Chinese investigation – and they would have had no incentive to hide it, as it would have pinned covid on basically a bad luck case once and for all.
    - DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
      They identified the at-risk farms right away and ordered them to immediately cull their stocks. The Chinese government has been very sensitive about the idea that the virus came from a farm. > it would have pinned covid on basically a bad luck case once and for all. The US would still have tried to make maximum propaganda use of that. If you recall the early "wet market" discussion, it was highly accusatory, and often blatantly racist.
      - 2y ago