Italy Sewage Study Suggests COVID-19 Was There In December 2019 (reuters.com) 174
New submitter UnsungBraveHeart shares a report from Reuters: Scientists in Italy have found traces of the new coronavirus in wastewater collected from Milan and Turin in December 2019 -- suggesting COVID-19 was already circulating in northern Italy before China reported the first cases. The Italian National Institute of Health looked at 40 sewage samples collected from wastewater treatment plants in northern Italy between October 2019 and February 2020. An analysis released on Thursday said samples taken in Milan and Turin on Dec. 18 showed the presence of the SARS-Cov-2 virus. Scientists said the detection of traces of the virus before the end of 2019 was consistent with evidence in other countries that COVID-19 may have been circulating before China reported the first cases on Dec. 31. A study in May by French scientists found that a Paris man was infected with COVID-19 as early as Dec. 27, nearly a month before France confirmed its first cases.
Small wonder (Score:3, Informative)
In Milano, Bergamo etc, thousands of Chinese workers are put together in sweatshops to create that famous 'Italian' fashion.
Re: Small wonder (Score:3, Funny)
...thousands of Chinese workers are put together...
...to form one huge Chinese Worker-Monster for Ultraman to do battle with??
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Re:Small wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
This is confusing to me, because a while back, I speculated that it might be worthwhile for - to prevent "pockets" of dangerous diseases from spreading undetected in the future - for sewage plants to be automatically monitored with as fine granularity as possible and for DNA or RNA of known "problematic" diseases to be amplified (this is used to detect unknown invasive aquatic animal species in large bodies of water). In response, I was told by a biologist that while such techniques work with DNA, it wouldn't work for RNA diseases (like COVID-19) because RNA is too unstable to persist intact long enough.
Yet they're clearly able to do it.
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Re:Small wonder (Score:5, Informative)
COVID is an RNA virus, so no DNA would be involved....unless some COVID RNA got messed with by reverse transcriptase, which is a bit unlikely.
OTOH, fragments of RNA persist a lot longer than complete strands, so perhaps they just found some "uniquely identifying" fragments.
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It's also confusing from a timeline and professional perspective.
Aren't we supposed to trust all these professional epidemiologists and not us arm chair experts here on /. ?
If this is a thing, how were we not doing this for the last 6 months? Seems like people would've been screaming about it to trace the spread.
It mostly seems like everyone is doing their best to prove "It's not China's fault!" (Originally, obviously it's many other countries fault after that)
Re: Small wonder (Score:2)
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Don't confuse shooting down a *bad* idea with *never being optimistic* or supporting a *good* idea.
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Do you know why the inventor of the PCR test, Kary Mullis, a huge believer in the scientific method, would never condone using it to identify "disease" in water?
https://www.ted.com/speakers/k... [ted.com]
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They are clearly able to find something when they know what they are looking for. The fundamental problem here is one that was demonstrated by China's own response (not the official one, but the coverup). We know that China put quite a bit of effort into preventing information about a potential pandemic coming out in mid Jan including arresting the doctor that discovered the virus early January. However hospitalisations were abnormally high throughout all of December with pneumonia cases which is what led t
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I'd love to reply to this with scientific discussion. I have loved /. since 1999! Best place for objective scientific discussion. Today the system is gamed so that those who get to moderate are marking as Troll anyone who favors open discussions and the scientific method over controlled consensus.
So, sadly, I can't critique was is scientifically wrong with testing water for a virus, or this comment will get modded negative to be sure it is not heard. I bet this gets modded down just for pointing out t
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To be fair, the reason for this is that Italy is one of the demographically aged countries on the planet. They simply do not have young people to do those jobs. They have to import them.
It's why their banks are basically dead. No young adults who take the loans out and make something with them.
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>There are plenty of young people for these jobs
No, there are literally not. This is what their population pyramid looks like:
https://www.populationpyramid.... [populationpyramid.net]
They have one of the worst if not THE worst ratio of old to young people of all nations on the planet. Their demographics are terminal. There's no way out.
Re:The unemployment rate for young adults... (Score:4, Insightful)
>...is 43%. Almost half of the available workers out there have no jobs.
I can't believe that I need to explain the most basic, most simply concept of economics that is "cost effectiveness".
Italy has terminal demographics. Politicians and business people understood this about two-three decades ago, as birthrate went off the cliff in 1970s. After a few failures to restart the birthrates in 1980s, they set up a system that allows reasonably easy import of work force to compensate. In Italian fashion, much of this system is "not on the books" and is handled by corruption in government + criminality a la mafia, which means that there's no real control over it and market is flooded with cheap, completely unregulated and barely documented foreign labour.
Foreign workers from the likes of former Yugoslavia, Albania, Maghreb, and China flood the market. Whatever is left of local youth is priced out if they don't have a quality education. With Italian education system being among the least effective in EU, you end up with a large amount of youth that is jobless and reliant on family for sustenance within 30 years of starting of the immigration policy.
Which is 2020. Welcome to reality.
Re:Small wonder (Score:4, Insightful)
I was saying this back in February when people were afraid to go to Chinese restaurants or freaking out over Chinese students being here: it's not a person's race that matters, it's whether they've been exposed. A Chinese person who hadn't been in China for months was less likely to be a COVID-19 carrier than a white person who had.
Sure, it's possible a recently sweatshop worker arriving in Italy could have brought it in. But unless planes traveling from China to Italy are full of mostly Chinese migrants, it's not particularly likely.
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"Sure, it's possible a recently sweatshop worker arriving in Italy could have brought it in. But unless planes traveling from China to Italy are full of mostly Chinese migrants, it's not particularly likely."
There are 320,794 Chinese citizens in Italy, there's even a Wikipedia page named "Chinese people in Italy".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
'Prato, Tuscany has the largest concentration of Chinese people in Italy and all of Europe. It has the second largest population of Chinese people overall in Italy
Re:Small wonder (Score:4, Insightful)
Which ignores the point: the race of these people is irrelevant. If the virus were circulating in Italy in December, then the important group to look at are people traveling from China (especially Wuhan) in November, whether they were Chinese or Italian or something else.
It doesn't matter if Italy has 320729 Chinese immigrants, unless they all came in November.
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"It doesn't matter if Italy has 320729 Chinese immigrants, unless they all came in November"
If many of them are undocumented and both living and working in close conditions then it only matters if there is a steady stream of them, and some of them came in November.
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You don't think someone of a certain nationality isn't *more likely* than the general population to go to their own country?
Not that it excuses not eating at chinese restaurants, being a cunt to someone, etc.
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If they're making sweatshop wages? Only marginally.
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Everyone I've met with these "early" stories has tested negative for anti-bodies.
Go get tested if you think it's true, it's cheap / free now.
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"Sure, it's possible a recently sweatshop worker arriving in Italy could have brought it in. But unless planes traveling from China to Italy are full of mostly Chinese migrants, it's not particularly likely."
It is, and they don't die. At least not officially, their bodies are removed by the Mafia and their passports sent back to China and a cousin lookalike will fly in to take their place.
https://www.newyorker.com/maga... [newyorker.com]
Re: Small wonder (Score:3)
I have a colleague that went to China in early Dec and was sick for about a month after returning to the U.S., with covid symptoms. (A closer colleague of hers and his wife got it in Jan. He's had complications.) And I know of a similar situation with another person in the same medium size town here. So yeah, probably in the US in some travelers in Dec and Jan.
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In Milano, Bergamo etc, thousands of Chinese workers are put together in sweatshops to create that famous 'Italian' fashion.
Ahh yes those infamous Chinese sweatshop workers who are so important and highly paid that they fly in and fly out from Wuhan to to China and somehow are able to spread disease across the world.
Sorry what was the relevance of your post again other than to take another stab at anything you could find that looks Chinese?
There's no doubt that the virus came from China, but to claim it had something to do with Chinese low cost workers in a sweatshop is either incredibly stupid, racist, or most likely, both.
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"Sorry what was the relevance of your post again other than to take another stab at anything you could find that looks Chinese?"
I posted it because there are 320.000 Chinese workers in Tuscany, where the Pandemic was worst, enough for regular flights to China and back.
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Indeed, low paid Chinese workers taking regular multi thousand euro flights, far more likely than rich tourists doing the same.
I'm truly amazed that you are able to type with perfect spelling and grammar given the rest of your brain seems completely non-functional.
Re: Small wonder (Score:3)
It's basically a merry-go-round of modern day slavery.
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In Milano, Bergamo etc, thousands of Chinese workers are put together in sweatshops to create that famous 'Italian' fashion.
There are 3.5million Chinese tourists travelling to Italy every year. Claiming this has anything to do with low cost workers is just plain moronic.
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"There are 3.5million Chinese tourists travelling to Italy every year. Claiming this has anything to do with low cost workers is just plain moronic."
Tourists sleep in hotels, not in the backroom of sweatshops with 20 people per room.
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Tourists sleep in hotels, not in the backroom of sweatshops with 20 people per room.
Oh yeah right I forgot Italian hotels don't have sewage systems. I'm truly bewildered with your responses. Please you're on a roll I want to see what peak stupid looks like so keep talking.
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Totally equally likely. And the explosion of cases happening 3 months later in Italy than China? Just y'know, a total mystery.
Everything is racism!
Not quite (Score:5, Informative)
Corona is known to have started in China in Nov and possibly Oct. As such that is was in Italy by Dec is no surprise at all! THe first word from China in Dec was that there was an outbreak by Dec 30 NOT the first case!
Re:Not quite (Score:5, Funny)
In other news, there's a large repository of vintage Italian sewage out there.
Re:Not quite (Score:5, Informative)
In other news, there's a large repository of vintage Italian sewage out there.
You say that as if there is something strange or funny about sampling sewagefor scientific purposes such as this but every country does this. In some parts of the US they use these sewage sampler teams to track down meth labs so archived sewage samples are actually very useful source of data and if you archive the samples you can do very useful retroactive research like this.
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If you hadn't previously considered the fact that there's a library of Italian doodoo then yes, that could strike someone as funny. Unrelated side note: you aren't German, are you?
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You say that as if there is something strange or funny about sampling sewagefor scientific purposes such as this but every country does this.
Unfortunately there are only a few job openings in glamour positions like this. Sewage testers get all the money and the chicks, as the old saying goes.
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Re:Well actually.. (Score:4, Informative)
No there isn't.
That Harvard paper was an incompetently done study that actually shows nothing. The tentpole of their whole paper was the parking lot study, but their whole "analyses" was doing a stats package LOESS curve fit - but the data is so sparse that is does not qualify for this technique, and to get a pretty curve they averaged over an 11 month interval. The result is meaningless.
And genomic analysis of the actual pandemic shows that every sample yet discovered coalesces on a single initiation event in early November - which is when the pandemic started. The Harvard paper dishonestly does not mention that genomic data entirely discredits their study. But is they had then there would have been nothing to study.
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I see some conspiracy theorists have mod points today. "Troll" - really?
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I don't believe that evidence, but I do believe that it was circulating in China back then. The reason is the nature of exponential growth. It starts off VERY slowly.
IIRC, when they detected it back in December it was a small cluster of atypical pneumonia cases. So isolated cases would not have been recognized. And most cases are either asymptomatic or have minimal symptoms. To me that says it was probably circulating for months before it was noticed. And was world wide (i.e. pandemic) before it was i
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I'm still waiting for people in my office to take antibody tests and talk about the results. We had a rash of fevers and dry coughs throughout February, with a child of one person having an atypical pneumonia which proved very hard to treat. That was well before there was any testing, so it's only the antibody test which will tell us if it was Covid-19 that swept through our office in February or something else. If our whole row has had it, that's about a 95% chance when we got it.
College town, and a whole
Re:Well actually.. (Score:4, Interesting)
About that antibody test.... It's unfortunate, but recent news from China indicates that antibodies aren't persistent. People who had expressed antibodies to COVID earlier are now reported to be no longer expressing them.
OTOH, it's not clear that antibodies are the primary defense against COVID. There's the innate immune system, but there are also TCells, which DO retain a memory of what needs to be wiped out. Unfortunately, there's currently no test to identify sensitized TCells.
This leads to a bunch of uncertainty. Possibly a durable immunity is impossible. Possibly it is. Vaccines made by modifying a harmless virus may only work one time. Etc. Note the "may" and "possibly". Lots of uncertainty. Time will tell, and probably nothing else will.
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Possibly a durable immunity is impossible. Possibly it is
The odds are in favor of it being possible. Coronavirus doesn't seem particularly special (unlike AIDS).
Time will tell, and probably nothing else will.
Indeed.
Re: Well actually.. (Score:2)
I know of two people in my medium size, US city that traveled separately for different employers to China in December, one in early December, that came back and were each very sick for a month with COVID symptoms. The earlier one likely infected two others that got sick in January. One of them is hospitalized with clotting problems. It doesn't seem surprising that the virus was getting around in December given the scale of the problem in Wuhan and how connected the city is for manufacturing and trade.
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THe first word from China in Dec was that there was an outbreak by Dec 30 NOT the first case!
Actually the first word about the outbreak of a virus wasn't until a full week after that. The person credited with discovering the virus only reported in December an unusually high cases of pneumonia in Wuhan, even the guy who discovered it didn't know he discovered a pandemic until roughly the second week of Jan, after which the ever loving government came in and tried to forcefully hush him.
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I know that this has been the official CCP propaganda line for a while to blame foreigners for it, but it still sounds just as absurd as it did when they were accusing Americans of intentionally infecting Wuhan with it a couple of months ago. Especially when you consider the facts such as that current outbreak started much earlier than december 2019, something easily observable from propagation pattern of this virus, and the fact that Italy has a large body of Chinese gastarbeiters. Not to mention the fact
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Corona "is known" to have started in China? Really?
The first cases were reported in China, yes. But nobody was looking for a new virus at the time, so how would any other country have known they already had cases?
Studies like this one in Italy cast doubt on the whole China origin story. It seems we really don't know where it all started.
Yes, really. This study does not "cast doubt on the whole China origin story" - it is entirely consistent with it.
All SARS-CoV-2 genomes ever sequenced (now in the tens of thousands of samples) coalesce on a single initiation event in early November. The virus sample closest to the root are all from Wuhan. This is where the pandemic originated.
The initial R0 and Rt for the virus in a virgin population of dense major city (Wuhan, the same size and density as NYC) was extremely high, about 5, with a 3 day do
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Yes the virus "is known" to have started in China. Really. The source of the corona virus has been traced to very specific Chinese bats. Even if the first case was reported in Italy the virus is still known to have started in China.
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Well, I take issue with using "known" that way, but it's certainly a very high probability. But be aware that bats don't respect national boundaries.
That said, the strain infecting people has been traced by genetic analysis to the strain that was prominent in Wuhan in December. That's a VERY high probability. There may be other branches from other places, but they haven't propagated to even approximately the same extent.
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Well, not really aware of how big it is, since I've never walked it. I am aware of where Wuhan is on the map. I tend to model China as being the size of the US, though I know it's a bit larger.
Your point was? If you claim that species of bat is never found outside of China, perhaps you're right. I'm no bat specialist. But there's no reason to believe that other species of bats don't carry the same virus. If it can move from bats to people, moving to another species of bat should be no problem. And ba
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Source?
When there's covid in December... (Score:2)
My my (Score:2)
The institute said it plans to launch a pilot study in July to monitor wastewater in tourist resorts.
Reminds me of the time Stalin's Russia examined Mao Zedong's toilet offering. [foreignpolicy.com]
Perhaps in the future, smart toilets will monitor your fecal droppings to let insurance companies know where to set your premiums.
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It's a main pundit site for US NatSec establishment. As such, it portrays the opinion of mainstream US NatSec community.
For the record, the "analysing fecal matter for clues into behavioural patterns" is actually grounded in science. Scientists today largely agree with gastrointestinal microbiome and our cognitive functions are linked, and there are complex interactions between the two. For example, there's evidence that some food cravings appear to be a direct consequences of specific microbiota specialize
Go with the flow (Score:2)
Makes me glad to be a programmer! (Score:2)
Can you imagine it being YOUR job to go through months-old sewage, looking for viruses?
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Providing the lab is properly kitted out for bio-hazards it can be very interesting.
Re:Makes me glad to be a programmer! (Score:5, Funny)
Can you imagine it being YOUR job to go through months-old sewage, looking for viruses?
I see you've never worked in software maintenance.
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LOL if I hadn't started this thread, I'd give you mod points!
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Older than that, but I don't have any mod points to give you. Sorry.
Actually, I rather enjoyed the intellectual challenge of maintenance programming, except for the deadlines. Too often it was ASAP, which can lead to making the bad situation worse. However, in the lucky cases I got to study and appreciate and sometimes even improve upon the work of better programmers than I ever was.
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Sure, sounds fascinating. And way better than the poor schlub who has to collect the samples.
Ive had Covid-19 before it became a global problem (Score:3)
So.... (Score:2)
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Also, Wuhan military games 2019 in October. 10.000 from all around the world were there at the time.
I am tired of this old crap (Score:2)
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Didn't find much about the Italian program, but here's a paper all about the US National Sewage Sludge Repository at the University of Arizona.
It's got pictures.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
ORLY? What's the methodology? (Score:3)
TFA describe the conclusions - that sewage testign shows there was CoV-2 in Italy in December. But it doesn't go into the methodology used to conclude that.
I recall a month or two ago where a Stanford study indicated there had been CoV-2 in the US in the middle of Q4 2019. Within a couple days it had been soundly debunked: One (of several) problems: They had been using a test with a high false-positive rate, and their positive rate for the tests of interest were actually lower than the publshed false positive rate of the test.
So I'd be interested in whether this studdy might have similar problems.
Yes, it would not be all that surprising to find that the virus had reached Italy mid-December. But let's not just assume the first study to indicate that was correct.
Re:That's not saying much (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you want? They reported the outbreak on 31/12. I really don't understand this "China was not open" thing.
Then you are either ill-informed or being deliberately obtuse or a sockpuppet on China's payroll. Satellite pictures show that hospital car parks in Wuhan were much busier through October 2019 compared to previous years. We now also know there was a significant increase in web searches using the terms 'cough' and 'diarrhea' in that area as early as August. Given the way China keeps a close eye on its population, they HAD to know something was up by late October or early November.
I'm not necessarily saying that was the right time to make a worldwide announcement, but they could have contacted international medical associations along with expert epidemiologists and virologists to come help them investigate. This didn't happen, instead China actively tried to cover it up. One of the first doctors who realised he was seeing the start of an epidemic and tried to alert people and the media was jailed by Chinese authorities for speaking out, he later died in prison from the corona virus. By 31/12 they realised it was to big to cover up, the epidemic was spreading, they had no choice but to report an outbreak to save as much credibility as possible. You call that being open? I don't.
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Localized mass infection is called "epidemic", which is something that should in fact cause action by local authorities to prevent it from becoming a pandemic.
Chinese authorities did the exact opposite, attempt to slow down local infections and ensuring through policy that it would go global. Examples of such policy are flight bans on domestic flights form Wuhan, and freedom to fly from Wuhan to foreign destinations. A policy which would be in alignment with "China vs the world" world view of CCP, where onc
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can you imagine what would have happened if they called "Pandemic" in October and it turned out it was just a localised outbreak ?
Can you imagine what would have happened if you'd read my post in it's entirety? Particularly the part where I wrote...
I'm not necessarily saying that [October] was the right time to make a worldwide announcement, but they could have contacted international medical associations along with expert epidemiologists and virologists to come help them investigate.
Re:That's not saying much (Score:5, Insightful)
These satellite images were completely unreliable data, it was not clear at what exact time they were taken, if there were lunchbreaks, weekends or visiting times.
The doctor getting jailed was on the news quickly after. This happened right before the point where the central government took over. Here we talk about a delay of a week or two. Also the doctor did not die in prison. He was released quickly, was working again and got infected at work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
This whole anti-China talk is just a distraction from the failings of the US, who wasted a month delaying the tests by bureaucracy and had no idea how the virus was spreading in their country.
Re:That's not saying much (Score:5, Insightful)
This does not distract from the fact that the US (and UK) perpetrated massive fuck-ups in terms of handling this virus. The fact still remains that, once again, China tried to cover up its problems rather than being open about them, and this time it had a wider effect because the problem happened to be a contagious disease. We can be angry about more than one issue you know.
Are you really saying that, despite a long history of secretive behavior from the Chinese government, in this particular instance they did their very best to be open and transparent with other nations, the exact opposite of what they've always done in the past? What motive could they possibly have for such a dramatic and sudden shift in their policies?
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He was interrogated because he said that it was a SARS outbreak, which was not really true and pretty scary.
No one really knew what was going on. It is funny, I see this from a lot of people,that they think the people up there know much more than they admit, also about the governments in the West. Thinking that this is all pl
Re: That's not saying much (Score:2, Informative)
You must be pretty obtuse to ignore all the facts that China covered it up: the doctor had said there was a SARS-like spreading since at least November 2019, when he alerted the international community he got arrested, was made to retract the statement even though the disease got the name of SARS-COV2 in February when the WHO declared it a local issue in China. Only in March, under pressure of the US and EU scientific community did they upgrade to potential pandemic.
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Re:That's not saying much (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you want? They reported the outbreak on 31/12. I really don't understand this "China was not open" thing.
Then you are either ill-informed or being deliberately obtuse or a sockpuppet on China's payroll. Satellite pictures show that hospital car parks in Wuhan were much busier through October 2019 compared to previous years. We now also know there was a significant increase in web searches using the terms 'cough' and 'diarrhea' in that area as early as August. Given the way China keeps a close eye on its population, they HAD to know something was up by late October or early November.
I'm not necessarily saying that was the right time to make a worldwide announcement, but they could have contacted international medical associations along with expert epidemiologists and virologists to come help them investigate. This didn't happen, instead China actively tried to cover it up. One of the first doctors who realised he was seeing the start of an epidemic and tried to alert people and the media was jailed by Chinese authorities for speaking out, he later died in prison from the corona virus. By 31/12 they realised it was to big to cover up, the epidemic was spreading, they had no choice but to report an outbreak to save as much credibility as possible. You call that being open? I don't.
Personally, I don't think this is a useful mindset.
First, remember that this thing follows an exponential curve. It ramps up from statistically irrelevant to notable fairly quickly. During that time, Country Zero will sensibly go from not knowing there's anything brewing to seeing what looks like a few anomalies to what looks like a flu issue to doing sufficient science to realize that's not the case. During those discovery phases, exponential growth happens. By the time the statistics are analyzed and the science has determined it's not just the flu, a lot of time goes by. Then you make your announcement. Two months doesn't seem unreasonable.
Second, remember what almost every country in the world did once told this was happening. Mostly screw-all. Mostly say "it won't come here". Mostly sit and watch Italy and Spain. The global reactions knowing what was happening were laggy. I'm massively impressed how well the world did actually do given psychology, but we should have done much, much better. To expect Country Zero to have been better at realizing, understanding, and sharing is wildly off the mark for Planet Earth, I think.
In my opinion, the only blame game that should be played - if any - is one that involves actions taken after knowing what's happening. For instance, crappy decisions still being made today in certain counties. China did just fine. Not perfect. But fine.
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First, remember that this thing follows an exponential curve. It ramps up from statistically irrelevant to notable fairly quickly. During that time, Country Zero will sensibly go from not knowing there's anything brewing to seeing what looks like a few anomalies to what looks like a flu issue to doing sufficient science to realize that's not the case. During those discovery phases, exponential growth happens. By the time the statistics are analyzed and the science has determined it's not just the flu, a lot of time goes by. Then you make your announcement. Two months doesn't seem unreasonable.
The amount of time that goes by during that discovery phase depends heavily on the 'mindset' of the officials in charge and their personal agendas. They could be proactive, invite international scientists and health organizations to help them investigate, give them free access to all the statistics data they need, and share their conclusions openly with the international community. Or they might not do that, instead they drag their feet, be secretive about the true scale of the issue in the hopes it will
Re:That's not saying much (Score:4, Informative)
What do you want? They reported the outbreak on 31/12. I really don't understand this "China was not open" thing.
Then you are either ill-informed or being deliberately obtuse or a sockpuppet on China's payroll. Satellite pictures show that hospital car parks in Wuhan were much busier through October 2019 compared to previous years
You never read that paper, clearly. I did. You also are entirely ignorant of the published literature on the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
The Harvard parking lot count study is incompetent fluff. The actual (extremely sparse) data set does not visually match the LOESS curve they publish (these guys clearly have no stats background) an immediate red flag failur. It would never have gotten published in a real journal, it is just sitting on a Harvard server that makes all Harvard papers available.
The gold standard data on the pandemic is the genomic analysis of the tens of fhousands of samples that have now been sequenced. Every single one of them belongs to a tree rooted on a single initiation even in early November.
Just skimming news sites headlines does not make you informed.
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Then you are either ill-informed or being deliberately obtuse or a sockpuppet on China's payroll. Satellite pictures show that hospital car parks in Wuhan were much busier through October 2019 compared to previous years.
Indeed they were. That doesn't mean anyone knew they were dealing with a viral pandemic. The first report of an actual identified virus was suppressed by the Chinese government in the first week of January, the first report that they were looking for a virus due to abnormalities happened on the 31st of December. The first open reports of an abnormally high number of pneumonia cases came out early December.
If you ended up in a Wuhan hospital in October they sure as heck wouldn't have been testing you for thi
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China knew about his LONG before they told anyone. They closed internal borders but allowed their external borders to remain open. They wanted to spread this far and wide to distrupt the world. They are a bunch of lying bastards and the fact anyone would defend them is absolutely sick.
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What do you want? They reported the outbreak on 31/12.
They had no choice because a whistleblower [bbc.com] told people around the world. The CCP would have continued to keep it quiet for months, if possible.
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Of course. But it's mapped long ago.
I don't know much about it, but I'm guessing there's a lot of other DNA in sewage, so it's maybe not a walk in the park to find coronavirus DNA in it. Actually I'm surprised it's possible at all. I'd heard about sewage epidemiology, but I thought it was just metabolites and bacteria they tracked.
Re:Can we only see new viruses in sewage after the (Score:4, Informative)
Meaning, do we need to know the DNA of the virus to look for it?
Yes. We are nowhere near being able to detect every virus in the sewage. Therefore we cannot detect specifically what is new.
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Meaning, do we need to know the DNA of the virus to look for it?
Yes. We are nowhere near being able to detect every virus in the sewage. Therefore we cannot detect specifically what is new.
Precisely, among other things sewage consists of a vast spectrum of DNA mixed up into a decomposing brew. Detecting a specific genome in that brew can be a bit of a challenge.
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It's not really something you want to use AI for.
Modern DNA/RNA sequencing gives you back little snipits of code. The standard approach is to compare each snippet with a database of sequences until you come up with something that's unique enough to a particular organism to indicate its presence. There are some cool algorithms to make that database comparison very efficient.
I know of at least one paper where they did train an AI to do the job, and it did pretty well, but it mostly gave a memory saving over t
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You do have to know the precise sequence for it to work. That is how it is able to pick out such a tiny amount of DNA.
This is only possible with known diseases. Four coronaviruses already circulate as part of the multi-disease 'common cold" syndrome, so surveillance for coronaviruses generally would always show them present.
The SARS-CoV-2 paper is not published yet (due out next week) but here is a study of sewage monitoring of several other viruses [nih.gov]. They can detect a single person shedding virus into the s
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You need to know what you're looking for. You have for a lack of a better expression a "shit ton" of cells, DNA sequences and broken down bio chemistry in waste water. We simply didn't know it was coming and didn't look for it.
What surprises me is that we are able to search for the virus in waste water 6 months after the fact. They must have stored samples for at least this long.
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Yes, you need the DNA of what you're looking for sequenced. Sewage is chock full of viruses, most, but not all, benign to human beings.
In fact the environment is more full of viruses than most people realize. A liter of *clean* seawater contains a hundred billion viruses, mostly bacteriophages [source [nature.com]].
Drinking water is disinfected, but by the time it ends up in a sewer it has picked up myriad viruses. If you go looking for unknown viruses in sewage you'll find them, more than you can handle, but nearly
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Just a point. COVID is an RNA virus, and doesn't use DNA. This doesn't change things that much, though.
If you want to look for a virus or bacterium in someplace, you need to be able to recognize what you're looking for. That means a uniquely identifying fragment. Could be protein, could be RNA, could be DNA, but it has to be uniquely identifying. DNA and RNA are currently the easiest to look for, but the noise level is so high that you need to match an exact pattern.
So, yes, we can only recognize thing
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This isn't the question.
The question is, if we can do this reliably, why aren't we doing this everywhere to detect spread in new municipalities ?
Sort of meta contact-trace.