Coronavirus thread

[Madiel]

One of the recent summaries of why the evidence for a zoonotic virus is strong. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/28/1160162845/what-does-the-science-say-about-the-origin-of-the-sars-cov-2-pandemic

[krummholz]

One of the recent summaries of why the evidence for a zoonotic virus is strong. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/28/1160162845/what-does-the-science-say-about-the-origin-of-the-sars-cov-2-pandemic

Yep, read that as well (and actually, posted the link to the AAAS forum). I was a little baffled that Worobey would consider the geographic distribution of the initial cases such convincing evidence, since there is a simple alternative scenario to zoonosis AT the market: patient zero (be they an infected researcher from the WIV or someone infected through zoonosis elsewhere) visits the market and infects someone who works there, then becomes ill, stays home and never infects anyone else. But the fact that samples from animal stalls at the market tested positive for actual SARS-CoV-2 could only be explained if that worker was also an animal handler or someone tasked with cleaning out the stalls, and it's still hard to explain that way the apparent fact that the infected stalls were precisely the ones used to house species (like raccoon dogs) that are known to be susceptible to bat coronaviruses.

Still, if the scientist on AAAS (who was, by the way, a biotech entrepreneur and not a retired biologist, my bad there) is correct, it does sound quite a bit less likely that the insertion of the so-called furin cleavage site in the SARS-CoV-2 genome could have happened naturally. For those better versed than I in microbiology, it might be worthwhile to read Nobel laureate David Baltimore's take on this. He was one of the earliest proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis and at first considered that insertion a "smoking gun" for human engineering, though he was more guarded in his comments at the above link.

[Karl Henning]

Today some leaked WhatsApp messages from a former (disgraced) Health Secretary here in the UK revealed that, at one stage during the early days of the pandemic, the government was considering ordering the public to 'EXTERMINATE ALL CATS' in the UK.
PS Don't show this message to Pohjola's Daughter!
    

Yikes!

[Madiel]

Yep, read that as well (and actually, posted the link to the AAAS forum). I was a little baffled that Worobey would consider the geographic distribution of the initial cases such convincing evidence, since there is a simple alternative scenario to zoonosis AT the market: patient zero (be they an infected researcher from the WIV or someone infected through zoonosis elsewhere) visits the market and infects someone who works there, then becomes ill, stays home and never infects anyone else. But the fact that samples from animal stalls at the market tested positive for actual SARS-CoV-2 could only be explained if that worker was also an animal handler or someone tasked with cleaning out the stalls, and it's still hard to explain that way the apparent fact that the infected stalls were precisely the ones used to house species (like raccoon dogs) that are known to be susceptible to bat coronaviruses.

Still, if the scientist on AAAS (who was, by the way, a biotech entrepreneur and not a retired biologist, my bad there) is correct, it does sound quite a bit less likely that the insertion of the so-called furin cleavage site in the SARS-CoV-2 genome could have happened naturally. For those better versed than I in microbiology, it might be worthwhile to read Nobel laureate David Baltimore's take on this. He was one of the earliest proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis and at first considered that insertion a "smoking gun" for human engineering, though he was more guarded in his comments at the above link.

The David Baltimore article is interesting, thanks. And yes, there's a distinct shift in his tone there. He basically seems to be saying either lab or natural is a possible explanation for the sequence.

I can't recall who it was I heard on a podcast quite early on saying that in their view the virus did NOT have the signs they would expect from human manipulation of the genome. I would have to go hunting to find it again and how much detail there was as to what signs they were looking for.

The other obvious problem with the hypothesis of a lab worker infecting the market is not just that the lab worker hasn't been identified, but the theory involves infecting ONLY the market and not anywhere else. Not family, neighbours, any other kind of contact.

[krummholz]

The other obvious problem with the hypothesis of a lab worker infecting the market is not just that the lab worker hasn't been identified, but the theory involves infecting ONLY the market and not anywhere else. Not family, neighbours, any other kind of contact.

It's not necessarily a problem - depends on the sequence of events and how much contact the person (who may or may not have been a lab worker in this scenario) had with other people. We assume that someone who goes to the market has lots of contact with many other people, but that isn't necessarily true. If it were *me*, I might leave my job, go directly to the market, interact with people there, then go directly home and (especially if living alone, as I do) not interact with anyone else except people at work. And if it WAS a researcher... we don't know for sure what precautions were taken at the WIV, but they SHOULD have (and might have) used PPE extensively and were not exposed to each other.

[Madiel]

It's not necessarily a problem - depends on the sequence of events and how much contact the person (who may or may not have been a lab worker in this scenario) had with other people. We assume that someone who goes to the market has lots of contact with many other people, but that isn't necessarily true. If it were *me*, I might leave my job, go directly to the market, interact with people there, then go directly home and (especially if living alone, as I do) not interact with anyone else except people at work. And if it WAS a researcher... we don't know for sure what precautions were taken at the WIV, but they SHOULD have (and might have) used PPE extensively and were not exposed to each other.

I wasn't suggesting within the lab but more generally. Yes, there are ways of constructing a scenario of transmission, the main problem is how you have to construct a scenario, without anything to back it up beyond wanting to justify a laboratory origin.

The origin in the market has a lot more positive evidence to support transmission, including the positive traces of the virus on equipment. Which of course wouldn't matter if there was clear evidence of an unnatural, engineered virus. But most scientists seem comfortable that the virus has characteristics consistent with a natural origin.

[krummholz]

I wasn't suggesting within the lab but more generally. Yes, there are ways of constructing a scenario of transmission, the main problem is how you have to construct a scenario, without anything to back it up beyond wanting to justify a laboratory origin.

The origin in the market has a lot more positive evidence to support transmission, including the positive traces of the virus on equipment. Which of course wouldn't matter if there was clear evidence of an unnatural, engineered virus. But most scientists seem comfortable that the virus has characteristics consistent with a natural origin.

Oh I agree, we don't know and will probably never know, for certain, the origin of the virus, especially now given the tensions between China and the West. My position on this is firmly agnostic since there are pretty strong signs that point in both directions, at least David Baltimore's original line of reasoning does point pretty strongly, though not conclusively, to an engineered virus and yet, as you say, we have positive samples from the stalls at the market. I guess what I'm saying is that the scenarios that entail the market only being an incidental epicenter and not the actual spillover site don't strike me as that far-fetched. Maybe it's because of my own lifestyle - I could easily imagine myself infecting a small number of people at a market and then no one else. To me, the two leading theories seem equally plausible, and I have really no reason to favor one over the other.

Do we really need to KNOW which it was to take steps to prevent another pandemic? I don't think so. We need to make sure that gain-of-function research on pathogens takes place only in facilities and by researchers equipped with the best containment hardware and following the strictest biohazard protocols. And we also need to reduce contact between humans and wild animals to make zoonotic spillover less likely. That way we cover all bases regardless of where SARS-CoV-2 actually came from.

Whether we can actually DO these things as a practical matter, of course, is another question.

[Madiel]

Do we really need to KNOW which it was to take steps to prevent another pandemic? I don't think so. We need to make sure that gain-of-function research on pathogens takes place only in facilities and by researchers equipped with the best containment hardware and following the strictest biohazard protocols. And we also need to reduce contact between humans and wild animals to make zoonotic spillover less likely. That way we cover all bases regardless of where SARS-CoV-2 actually came from.

Whether we can actually DO these things as a practical matter, of course, is another question.

Completely agree with you on this. Frankly none of this was a surprise to people in the field who have warned about the possibility of novel diseases, and about the lack of preparedness, for many years.

But it is in the way of things that people remember for a little while why something was important and then forget and it ceases being a priority. In the USA, George W Bush invested a lot in pandemic preparedness because, after 9/11 (terrorism) and Hurricane Katrina (natural disaster response), he didn't want to also be caught out on the other big threat he was warned about. But by the time of Trump lots of people considered Bush's level of disease preparedness to be a big waste of money.

Of course it's all a "waste" when the risk never eventuates. But that's how risk management works. See also Y2K and all the people who wrongly believe the bug wasn't a big deal precisely BECAUSE the risk was managed well.

[Spotted Horses]

There is no reason to go looking for the laboratory at fault when the scientists say the virus shows no sign of being FROM a laboratory, ANY laboratory, in the first place. Starting with the existence of a laboratory in Wuhan is exactly backwards. You need to start with a laboratory-engineered virus, and then of course working out which laboratory engineered it would be fairly straightforward in the circumstances.

You've gone a little too far there. The preponderance of evidence seems to indicate that the virus was a product of natural processes rather than engineering. This does not rule out a laboratory event, since a virus collected from the wild and under study could have infected a worker, who brought it out into the general population. That worker could have gone to the wet market where crowded conditions could have led to rapid spread. I'm more inclined to believe that the spread was natural because of Occam's razor, the simpler explanation is more likely to be true.

As far as the DoE now claiming they have "new intelligence" supporting the lab leak version, I find that utterly unconvincing. There is no evidence they are willing to put forward. When these intelligence agencies don't have a clue they have to make something up. I suspect that is what is happening.

[Madiel]

You've gone a little too far there. The preponderance of evidence seems to indicate that the virus was a product of natural processes rather than engineering. This does not rule out a laboratory event, since a virus collected from the wild and under study could have infected a worker, who brought it out into the general population. That worker could have gone to the wet market where crowded conditions could have led to rapid spread. I'm more inclined to believe that the spread was natural because of Occam's razor, the simpler explanation is more likely to be true.

As far as the DoE now claiming they have "new intelligence" supporting the lab leak version, I find that utterly unconvincing. There is no evidence they are willing to put forward. When these intelligence agencies don't have a clue they have to make something up. I suspect that is what is happening.

I think I've pretty much addressed this in conversation with Krummholz. The point I was making is that you don't start with intelligence agencies finding the perpetrator, you start with scientists determining whether there is any perpetrator at all.

As I understand it the argument for a natural virus is not solely a jump from a wild animal to a person, but mixing between species before human transmission was possible. This is fairly well known as a mechanism (eg flu strains develop in China when birds and pigs are kept together).

[Florestan]

I've heard of it before, but have only a few downloaded apps on my cell phone (both bird ID programs).  So, tell me about it.  Why does it matter/importance (if it is)?

PD

You can have video-calls (including multiple users), write messages, share files and location, stuff like that. It's as widely used and known as Google, hence my surprise. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp

[Pohjolas Daughter]

You can have video-calls (including multiple users), write messages, share files and location, stuff like that. It's as widely used and known as Google, hence my surprise. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp

The tiny bit that I later googled about it, it seems that it's more popular in Europe (and maybe elsewhere--I forget--vs in the US).

PD

[Spotted Horses]

The tiny bit that I later googled about it, it seems that it's more popular in Europe (and maybe elsewhere--I forget--vs in the US).

PD

I use it primarily as a text messaging app, although it supports images and other attachments and voice and video(?) calls. (Similar to iMessage, but not restricted to Apple users). It came from Silicon Valley and is now owned by Facebook.

[greg]

Not the very specific thing they were studying. Unless you think "viruses" is specific.

If we are going to continue with this analogy, there was no proof that a robbery was involved. It reminds me of a relative of my mother who insisted she was robbed when my mother was pretty darn sure the relative just left something behind when leaving a train.

This again gets back to the problem with relying on intelligence agencies for this stuff. They are trained to find your "robber", so they are inevitably going to look for one rather than taking a step back and asking whether anyone at all was robbed.

Maybe it's not the best analogy, because robberies are intentional, while I don't suspect the leak was intentional (I mean, it could be, but I'm not really on that side of the fence unless it was proven). So maybe I'm just being confusing.

I wasn't suggesting within the lab but more generally. Yes, there are ways of constructing a scenario of transmission, the main problem is how you have to construct a scenario, without anything to back it up beyond wanting to justify a laboratory origin.

Well, the only information I've found regarding details about what was going on with lab at the time, the whole "scenario," was the video I shared a while back, a few months after Covid started.

They were studying bat corona viruses at the time, people from the lab go missing during the exact weeks when Covid was first discovered, etc. Just seems like people that work at the lab could easily have walked over to the market, as a normal person, and infected the place before they knew they were sick. I know it's faaaaar from ideal, it's not HARD evidence, and we have to speculate a bit, but it's the only thing we have, really.

The tiny bit that I later googled about it, it seems that it's more popular in Europe (and maybe elsewhere--I forget--vs in the US).

PD

Right. The only reason I know if it is because of work, and most of the people I work with are from India. Before that, I never even heard of it when they introduced it to me a few years ago.

[Pohjolas Daughter]

I use it primarily as a text messaging app, although it supports images and other attachments and voice and video(?) calls. (Similar to iMessage, but not restricted to Apple users). It came from Silicon Valley and is now owned by Facebook.

Thanks for the info.  I have IM and FaceTime on my Macs.  The only other program/app that I've used is one through a doctor's office for live video chats.

PD

[Todd]

From Newsweek: America' COVID Response Was Based on Lies

[Madiel]

Well that guy doesn't understand science at all.

But of course neither does Todd.

It's fairly evident that now that Todd has lost the platform to post the nuttiest Republican views on how Russia is protecting itself in Ukraine, he's just going to come here and post the nuttiest Republican views on Covid. I expect the results to be equally edifying.

[Karl Henning]

When Beijing calls you a bullshi**er ....

Chinese state media calls out Elon Musk over coronavirus tweet

[SimonNZ]

Does Todd actually believe the uneloborated and unsupported claims that Scott fucking Atlas is making unconvincingly there?

Or does he just once again want to have a stir, to enjoy watching everyone react?

[Karl Henning]

Does Todd actually believe the uneloborated and unsupported claims that Scott fucking Atlas is making unconvincingly there?

Or does he just once again want to have a stir, to enjoy watching everyone react?

My guess is he enjoys being a ****-stirrer.