WHO Says Would be 'Highly Speculative' To Say COVID Did Not Emerge in China (reuters.com) 204
The World Health Organization's top emergency expert said on Friday it would be "highly speculative" for the WHO to say the coronavirus did not emerge in China, where it was first identified in a food market in December last year. From a report: China is pushing a narrative via state media that the virus existed abroad before it was discovered in the central city of Wuhan, citing the presence of coronavirus on imported frozen food packaging and scientific papers claiming it had been circulating in Europe last year. "I think it's highly speculative for us to say that the disease did not emerge in China," Mike Ryan said at a virtual briefing in Geneva after being asked if COVID-19 could have first emerged outside China. "It is clear from a public health perspective that you start your investigations where the human cases first emerged," he added, saying that evidence might then lead to other places.
Pronta Moda China (Score:3)
In Northern Italy, 500.000 Chinese workers make 'Italian' fashion for Chinese wages and they travel back and forth all the time.
Re:Pronta Moda China (Score:5, Informative)
310,000 Chinese live in Italy [theguardian.com], most of which work for the textile industry there. I was unaware of this until now.
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That seems unlikely, if they were working for such low wages in a relatively expensive country like Italy then how would they afford pricey airfares back and forth to China all the time? A quick search suggests â600-700 for a return flight.
And why wouldn't locals take those jobs? Apparently the pay is good enough to afford international air fares.
Re: Pronta Moda China (Score:2)
Maybe youâ(TM)re in the wrong place? I got dirt cheap flights to Melbourne when I was living in Shanghai at a fraction of the price available with western travel agents. Further more, donâ(TM)t expect these people to be living with the same costs as you expect: they might be more experienced and more prepared than you to be very thrifty. Iâ(TM)m talking from experience. Italyâ(TM)s pretty damned cheap too if you get away from American tourist places
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Because the airport fees are lower in Asia/Pacific area.
I can fly cheeper from Bangkok to Tokyo than the landing fee in Paris is from BKK.
ItalyÃ(TM)s pretty damned cheap too if you get away from American tourist places
That was at Lira times. Now we have 2020, sorry: you are living in the past. (And textile companies are ot in cheap areas anyway).
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These are chartered flights by the industryâ"they are not paying retail.
Reportedly some of them work three weeks then fly back for a week off, then come back. The first CoVID-19 case in Italy was a shoe factory worker from Wuhan (again, according to reports).
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These are chartered flights by the industryâ"they are not paying retail.
Reportedly some of them work three weeks then fly back for a week off, then come back.
That would still be very expensive, so it seems unlikely.
Just keep believing that. (Score:3)
You think these people organise their own trips back and forward?
You think they just turn up at the door of sweatshops and ask for a job?
This is the face of modern wage slaves - these people are moved en-mass, and work in Italy in Chinese conditions so that the products are 'made' in the EU, and hence get much better access to markets, and a higher perceived value.
And they are not working a month or so between 'trips home', they are worked until burnt out, then sent home.
This is globalism at its best - maxi
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No, they don't. ... no idea why you are so stupid so often.
They make it for low level Italian wages
If you work in Europe you have to pay taxes, health care, pension etc.
Do you really think for a "Chinese Wage" someone is working "illegally" in Europe and flies back and forth from his home country?
How should that be possible on that scale?
Re: Pronta Moda China (Score:2)
So, they can easily catch the virus in Italy and take it to China.
Re: Pronta Moda China (Score:2)
In which case we should have seen the virus spring up in multiple locations in China simultaneously and not just in one place.
Re:Pronta Moda China (Score:5, Funny)
In Northern Italy, 500.000 Chinese workers
You don't really need precision to thousandths, I think they only use whole Chinamen in Italy.
Re: Pronta Moda China (Score:2)
Even then a percentage of the 310 000 workers may take the trip once per year for family reasons to make up a significant enough number to be a channel of transportation for diseases.
Then China may even subsidize their travels because having workers in other countries is one way of aggregating knowledge about industrial processes and whatever else you can think of. Not every worker may do this on a level that's even seen as espionage, but the aggregated volume can be processed and used to build a database o
Tune in next week (Score:2, Insightful)
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When the check clears
China's contribution to the WHO is less than half of the USA's. Your Trump conspiracy bullshit is better left to morons retweeting on Twitter. Or maybe the WHO just hates you and Trump. Yeah that's actually quite likely.
Re: Tune in next week (Score:2)
Yeah, and perhaps this article shows the USA's cheque has just cleared?... or is about to...or they just would like one to be sent in the first place... or something.
Basically, the whole "cheque" angle is nonsense.
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And let Australia serve as an example, that when you question the CCP, we will rain down economic hardship in the Billions.
Re: Tune in next week (Score:2)
... Well, I'm sure there's a deal in the works from the USA to compensate - that's what I assumed anyway, much like the UK. Otherwise, well, your government is stupid...which doesn't preclude the UK government from being stupid for other reasons.
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Given how quickly this disease spreads and how nobody had any immunity, it seems insane to argue that it had just been idling around in Europe for ages and then came to China. Europe had an abnormally low [euromomo.eu] number of deaths during the last flu season, and nobody was taking any special precautions. The spike doesn't become visible until the spring.
So much for... (Score:2)
So much for China stating they will be more open about future viruses.
Seems everyone wants to say/do the exact opposite of what reputable scientists say. Now China will probably hide all new diseases as the emerge.
Overwhelming evidence points to Covid-19 emerged in China, and as further proof China forced the CDC people to leave around the time it started emerging. Of course the US President threw gas on the fire also by shaming China through the whole period.
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Re: So much for... (Score:2)
Can you cite any reputable sources to back up this claim Mr Trump?
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The oldest virus samples are found in sewage water in north Italy from September 2019.
However it is still plausible it originated in China.
Bottom line it does not matter where it originated. The outbreak in China was managed badly, that is the real problem.
Re: So much for... (Score:2)
Plausible, yes, but also plausible it went the other way, from Italy to China.
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Yes, indeed. That however would break down the "Bat Hypothesis" as origin.
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Re: So much for... (Score:2)
Any reference to that? And is it this specific virus or another variant?
Notice that sewage water don't specify which type of living body that excreted it. Can be animals as well.
It is quite pointless to engage in this (Score:4, Insightful)
"where did the virus came from" BS, except for the people who have legitimate scientific interest.
The fact is that the epidemic spread out of control not because of China, but because of the many "developed" countries, who chose "the economy" over public health and in the process harmed both.
There are many examples, from poor developing to very developed countries, who rapidly introduced sensible measures and managed to contain the outbreak at home.
Those who did not have nobody to blame but themselves, the virus origin notwithstanding.
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Way to be not on top there. The discussion is about the origins, but hey, just ramble on.
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99% of the people who want to know where the virus came from are not scientists and have no interest in actually preventing this from happening again. They're not looking for a blameless retrospective which would allow us to make changes to reduce the risk of this happening again and there's barely an acknowledgement that it could have started anywhere. These people often want a country that can be blamed for killing millions. Any discussion and research about it is contaminated by that interest group, this
Re: It is quite pointless to engage in this (Score:2)
Wet markets
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Is that a new prayer of some sort?
Re: It is quite pointless to engage in this (Score:2)
Wet jobs.
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A "wet market" is a market where you can buy live animals for meat, and either get them butchered on purchase or kill them yourself when you get them home. It's an almost ideal environment for a virus to jump species because you have humans, ducks, chickens, pigs, sometimes even turtles and other things, all in packed into a relatively small space.
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But if came from a lab through negligence, then the world would the right to claim some compensation from China.
Re:It is quite pointless to engage in this (Score:4, Insightful)
It did not spread because developed countries chose "the economy" over public health. It spread because developed countries do not micromanage their citizens' movements, and aren't able to flip a switch to instantly stop their citizens from traveling internationally or moving around domestically like China can. They operate on the premise that people are free to move around and do whatever they want, until proven otherwise. Rather than the premise that people should only be allowed to move around and do things when the government gives them permission. The developed countries which have managed to prevent or at least control the virus's spread - New Zealand, Iceland, South Korea, and (initially) Japan - are all islands or essentially an island (South Korea). So they effectively did have a single switch they could flip, in the form of shutting off air and sea travel. That allowed their governments to isolate themselves from the rest of the world with minimal infringement on their citizens' freedoms.
Your assertion is the flip side of the ridiculous arguments always made every time the government does impose strict measures and it turns out to be a false alarm. (e.g. The massive evacuations ahead of Hurricane Dorian, before it changed direction and just skirted the U.S. coast instead of making landfall.) These decisions aren't made knowing for certain what's going to happen. All we have to go on is speculative probability - a best guess as to what's most likely to happen. Sometimes we will err on the over-cautious side, sometimes we will err on the under-cautious side. We will almost never get it exactly right, and those blaming others for failing to get it right are usually operating with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. If you truly knew this would become a global pandemic back in November 2019, please provide a link to your posts warning us and pleading with everyone to shut down travel and commerce and prepare. (FWIW, I did think this had a good chance to go global when a friend joked to me about the "new flu virus in China" last December. But I knew that was speculation on my part so I just cautioned him not to think this virus was a joke, and that he should prepare just in case.)
Re:It is quite pointless to engage in this (Score:5, Insightful)
It did not spread because developed countries chose "the economy" over public health.
But yes, it did, and yes you're lying. There was significant opposition against any measures in February and March, and even after the covid-19 spread numbers increased drastically and in places people started dying in large numbers, many business associations still pushed successfully for delay of lockdowns, restrictions, mask wearing and basically any other measure.
It is so well-documented, that it is beyond dispute without using alternative facts.
The developed countries which have managed to prevent or at least control the virus's spread - New Zealand, Iceland, South Korea, and (initially) Japan - are all islands or essentially an island (South Korea).
Yep, we've gone to rationalizing away the lack of measures, but you obviously don't travel too much internationally and have no idea how shit looks. Let me give you an example of the difference, because explaining measures, level of preparedness and how the proximity to China and the population densities more than negate the "island" effects you're speculating about.
I traveled to Japan in January 2020, and to Italy in early February.
In Japan, just like every other fucking time, I was screened at the airport and had to fill out a medical declaration. That is matched to my passport, stored somewhere and used when needed. Most people on the public transportation and venues were wearing masks already, because their government has asked them to do. Sanitizers, etc. have been available in Japan for ages, and yep, they were already out.
In Italy, where I wore a mask because it was obvious where the thing was going, I was openly laughed at. Even workers in very high-risk areas, like stations and airports didn't have them. When I left Italy two weeks later, still with the mask on, nobody was laughing, but most masks were still worn on the chin or not at all by airport and public transportation employees, and were never seen elsewhere.
Even when it became clear that the country will impose restrictions, and the Italians went on a shopping spree before the lockdown, there were practically no people using protection.
Basically, Europe and US refused measures because they wrongly believe disease isn't a threat to them because of some perceived "superiority". When that didn't materialize, we got the China blame.
Well, sorry, but actions - and lack thereof - have consequences.
Your assertion is the flip side of the ridiculous arguments always made every time the government does impose strict measures and it turns out to be a false alarm.
No, it isn't. My assertion that measures were vastly inadequate and that lead to the enormous spread of the virus are well supported by evidence.
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New Zealand, Iceland, South Korea, and (initially) Japan - are all islands or essentially an island (South Korea).
Greece? Estonia? Denmark? None of those are islands and also have low death rates overall. Not as low as Japan. Put it this way, Denmark and Belgium have similar percapita GDPs but very different rates of death. Greece has borders with several other countries but didn't do so badly.
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It is not pointless
Australia is an island, but within are separate states which have closed borders and done lockdowns to successfully stop transmission.
If citizens care so little for their neighbours and their own lives, carry on as usual.
It only takes one uncaring idiot to restart the spread of this virulent disease.
The borders are opening for xmas holidays which will test our ability to walk and chew gum at the same time.
If you feel sick, isolate and get tested.
Recall has biases (Score:2, Informative)
Such "scientific" observation was accompanied by other, more politicized comments to condemn the emerging photos of the enforcement of a mandatory quarantine in Wuhan and its closest, smaller cities. Many comments implied
Re: Recall has biases (Score:2)
I donâ(TM)t think Bojo the Clown pushed herd immunity or warmer weather. I donâ(TM)t think he did much at all beyond celebrating a landslide general election win and getting Brexit done.
That's gotta be Daltry talking. (Score:3)
I'm certain Townshend would disagree...
The late humour of Terry Pratchett (Score:3)
Terry Pratchett once wrote, "A lie can travel around the world before the truth has got its boots on."
His message now reads like a prophecy when one replaces "lie" with "virus".
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Highly speculative, but not unreasonable (Score:5, Informative)
The virus had clearly been circulating among people long before it acquired the mutations that allow it to spread wildly. One reason to believe this is the large number of people with mild reactions. A newly arrived virus generally has an extremely strong reaction. The recent "avian flu" is a good example.
As to *where* it was spreading, this gets speculative. My guess would be among the populace that lived in villages near the various bat caves. And many of those are in China.
It's important to remember that if you don't know what you're looking for, most serious cases of COVID look like pneumonia. So it could circulate for a long time without being noticed...until it picked up a mutation that allowed it to spread much more readily.
So it's quite reasonable to believe that an early version of COVID was being imported (and exported) from China fairly early last year. This doesn't pin-point the origin, even to the continent, but China looks like the most probable location. Nearly certainly China was the location where the crucial mutation happened. It's not clear that it was the Wuhan market, that's just as far back as we've been able to trace it, but people from a wide area of the country met there. My guess is that the crucial mutation happened somewhere in the Chinese countryside, and that the doctors there didn't notice it. (Remember that the virus doesn't spread as well in low density populations that are largely immobile.) Some merchant caught it and brought it to the Wuhan market, and there shared it will his customers and business associates.
That said, there's strong presumptive evidence that a version of it was circulating in Europe in August of 2019. This is from analysis of sewage, so it's not able to point to a specific source. And the RNA was degraded, so it's not possible to say it was the same as the current version. My guess is that it was an ancestral version that lacked a crucial facilitator of spreading.
OTOH, I am not a virologist. This is based on various news reports and a rather basic understanding of evolution. (I read and understood "The Extended Phenotype" and various other similar works...but that's where it rests.)
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The issue is that the natural reservoir for the virus is supposedly a bat whose habitat spreads across all of S. China, SE Asia and S. Asia. It goes as far as Sri Lanka. Many of these parts of the world also see the bat as a potential food source, or go around digging in the caves for the guano (e.g. https://www.fauna-flora.org/ne... [fauna-flora.org]), so interaction is plenty. They are also a large source where the pangolin trade occurs. SE and S Asia apparently haven't been hit as hard by the virus despite being much
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LMAO (Score:2)
Honest politicians at work (Score:2)
Ones who stay bought.
...laura
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Re: Where it came from doesn't matter as much as (Score:3)
True. The evidence of "negligence, incompetence or malice" in the U.S. came after China had identified the virus and warned the world, and was engaged on a much larger scale than anything going on in China.
If only the U.S. had reacted as cogently and effectively as China, we could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. At least China saved their own people. America was too preoccupied with beating China at trade to save any of their own people from a disease.
Very Important - but for a different reason (Score:2)
As far as politics, I don't care at all where the virus started. There is no evidence it was released intentionally, and so why does it matter?
I DO care very much though about how the disease has progressed. There are a number of surprising things:
Sever bits of evidence ( but not conclusive I think) that COVID was circulating in various populations for months before the out break occurred. This is VERY strange since it seems to have a doubling time of only about 3 days if no precautions are taken. It sh
I have no doubt it origonated in China (Score:5, Insightful)
In 2013 one cave in china was home to 6 species of bats which combined had 292 different strains of corona virus collectivly among them. All portions of the current COVID-19 virus existed in those samples with one exception, the critical ACE-2 receptor binding "spike" protein. But it just so happens that some of those same bat species like to co-inhabit the same tree cavities that the pangolins in that area inhabit. Why is this relevant? Because bats do not have the same ACE-2 receptor bindings as humans, and the pangolin has them almost exactly the same as us humans. If the pangolins were to be bathed in bat excrement containing many types of corona virus then it was only a matter of time before the RNA was mixed within one unfortunate pangolin and out popped a new hybrid virus capable of attacking the ACE-2 receptor thus making that new virus able to bridge the evolutionary gap to humans. The last step of actually infecting humans is the fact that humans there often seek out, kill, and eat pangolins. It only takes one infected animal to spread this new virus amongst lots of different animals within that meat market. Its self perpetuating. With lots of people handling lots of caged animals, all sick with virus, it is only a matter of time before a person with a weakened immune system gets sick and that virus then has the opportunity to mutate to become much better adapted to humans. Its a natural progression where evolution does exactly what it does best. It adapts.
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I believe he was suggesting that NY's infections primarily came from European visitors/travelers, and not from Asian travelers. It was NOT a stem origin claim.
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Still I do not recall the vulgar Cuomo offering proof to back up his comments?
The main strain in NY was analysed, though, and that strain was from Europe. This was mentioned a lot around April. I haven't kept up with every statement from Cuomo and his staff, though.
Re: It's the European virus. (Score:2)
Cuomo, Trump, de Blasio, Guiliani are all members of the same team - people doing anything to get a position of power so whatever they say is for personal gain.
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The Virus came to the United States (Most notably New York State) from Europe. But the Europe got it from China.
Please stop being stupid.
Re: It's the European virus. (Score:2)
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Cuomo... keeps having to tell you
Cuomo likes to tweak Trump's nipples, there's probably film at 11 if you're into that. His mouth is almost as big as Mick Jagger's, so he can talk shit all day without getting tired.
Re: Satellite (Score:2)
Re: Satellite (Score:5, Insightful)
If I recall, by China's own admission it originated in a wet market in Wuhan.
You do not recall correctly.
The first cluster of the outbreak to be detected was in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in the dense city center of Wuhan in late December, and the initial theory (and a reasonable one) was that it was where the cross-over event had occurred.
But sequencing of the genome shows that the cross-over event occurred about 6 weeks before the outbreak was detected, and that the first known case of illness, later identified as COVID-10 was not associated with the market and fell ill on December 1.
A couple of days before that seafood market outbreak was detected a COVID-19 patient was checked into a hospital in Paris having apparently been infected by his wife, who was infected where she worked at a market next to the international airport which had frequent arrivals from China. By mid-December, a month after cross-over, it was widely distributed around Wuhan ad had already split into two major variants that were seeding the world at different rates through the very active international airport in Wuhan.
The seafood market appears to have been simply a very good place for a super-spreader event and came to the attention of medical people due to the large number of cases.
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The current hypothesis is that the virus actually spread from bats to humans.
I would not wonder - considering the strong connection of China with many African countries - if it originated in Africa.
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If you actually look at the history of pandemics, the majority of them have originated in China and travelled outside via trade routes. This pandemic fits right into that pattern. Africa would indeed be an outlier.
Please sight at least some sources (Score:4)
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What actually is a "wet market"? I only see this term on /.
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Some try to push the notion that they mostly/exclusively sell wild animals of the sort that westerners would never consider eating and that they are an exclusively Asian thing but reality is they sell all kinds of animals, poultry, fish and produce, both domesticated and wild captured, and they are all over the world.
And it wasn't that long ago that even in the USA and Europe such things were equally common.
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From what I have seen, in the West the live animal sales are usually "sale barns" where groups of live animals are auctioned off then sent elsewhere for slaughter. These usual
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In asia no one calls it a "wet market", it is a market and that all.
You get from shoes to living fish what ever you want. And eat in small "boxes" shops.
And no, no one is slaughtering a sheep or a bull in market and sells it it on demand, that idea is just retarded. I doubt they even slaughter a chicken or a duck in a market, but who knows. I live mostly in Thailand, here living animals are basically only fish.
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In asia no one calls it a "wet market", it is a market and that all.
False. Almost nobody in Asia uses English words for local features like markets. Starbucks, sure. But not a wet market.
Re: Satellite (Score:2)
Re: Satellite (Score:2)
See the term wet job [wikipedia.org] to get further understanding.
The market may have been the crossover point, but it can as well have happened elsewhere and the market was just a spreader event. It only takes one person with no or mild symptoms to start the spreading.
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With an open drainage trough with continuous water, where blood from various animals is rinsed away. This very common architectural feature is what makes it a "wet market."
Most of the world banned it over 2500 years ago, but it made a brief comeback in western Europe a few hundred years ago.
Can you provide references for which iron age villages in Germany, etc., banned this in 500BC?
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Re:Satellite (Score:5, Informative)
It is too bad that this post has gotten a Score of 5 (as I type this) since it consists of vague collections of stuff he saw on Slashdot, but never bothered to actually read.
The Harvard paper - the source of the ambulance imagery claim - was never published anywhere, not even on one of the those on-line preprint sites, it was just put on a Harvard server where miscellaneous papers written by people at Harvard are dropped.
It did not pass the most casual reading laugh test. The satellite data was extremely sparse (on average about one sample per parking lot per month), the curve fitting they used was incompetent and clearly did not match the underlying data, just for starters. This claim has vanished from view, no one believes this.
There is not a single genetic sample from anywhere in the world, including China, that shows the SARS-CoV-2 virus before December 2019. Not one. It was not "in France" in October 2019. All of the efforts looking at indicators that possibly show the virus existed before December 2019 have failed as no virus DNA has ever surfaced on further investigation. Due to the power of genetic analyses we do not have entertain these speculations at all.
Further, all genetic samples of the virus ever sequenced form part of tree rooted in time around the middle of November of last year. The cross-over event into the human population starting the pandemic occurred at that time, in the vicinity of Wuhan, and not before.
The nonsense that China is attempting to perpetrate, and the subject of the TFA, is just that - nonsense.
Can the virus be transported on the outside of frozen food and cause infection? Maybe, though if so, it is an extremely low probability event - so much so that in the midst of worldwide pandemic infectious virus on frozen products has only just now been identified, if the identification is even correct (it may not be).
But the idea that it was circulating from some other source outside of China, far from the natural habitats of its viral predecessors (central China), without leaving a trace in any sample anywhere, and got imported into the region where coronavirus cross-over events have been seen repeatedly to start the pandemic is absurd.
Earlier than December 2019 (Score:4, Interesting)
There is not a single genetic sample from anywhere in the world, including China, that shows the SARS-CoV-2 virus before December 2019.
I do not know if they confirmed this by genetic sampling but the first officially recorded incident of the disease was on 17th November 2019 according to this article which references a Chinese source which, if anything, would have a bias to move dates later. Given that it says that after that first case 5 cases per day were reported that suggests that it was already spreading so undoubtedly it existed before 17th November 2019. [livescience.com]
I agree the ambulance claim is ridiculous but given the evidence that a lot of people with the virus are either asymptomatic or have symptoms consistent with a serious cold, I would not be surprised to learn that the virus was around for a short while before this first recorded patient.
Re:Satellite (Score:4, Interesting)
There is not a single genetic sample from anywhere in the world, including China, that shows the SARS-CoV-2 virus before December 2019.
There are plenty in Italy. First news a few month ago was: it was first time found in November.
The second news was: now we know they were first time in September.
How do we make that? Well, we Germans seem to suck. The Italians sample sewerage water daily, probably hourly and store it. Analyzing old sewerage water shows, the virus was in north Italy already around in September lat year. I heard about Wuhan in November ... when I was in Thailand and Vietnam closed it border immediately.
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Don't feel bad. Nobody analyzes their sewage like Italy does. Their program is the envy of the world.
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I believe we just sample and store daily data from sewage treatment plants, probably not for this sort of analysis, but just to check for the plant normal functions, and to be able to track back when any malfunction occurred. And I guess to check for the spread of epidemics, for stuff like cholera and typhoid fever.
I haven't read about researchers finding corona virus traces in waste water, but I guess some researchers might have known that there were sample libraries available and might have looked at them
Re:Satellite (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not sure who "we" is, but lots of cities regularly sample their wastewater. Most don't store the samples very long though, and don't typically do more than standard biological testing on them. IIRC Italy is a world leader in wastewater bio research and set up their program more than a decade ago. There's a smaller scale one in the US somewhere... Arizona maybe? And there are lots of places that are interested in setting up such things. But you don't build a shit library overnight.
No, how well they did their job isn't "anyone's guess." In science you write a paper detailing your procedures and findings so anyone who cares to do so can evaluate how well you did your job.
Re: Satellite (Score:2)
It's reported here in Sweden that they see the Corona virus in the wastewater. I'm not sure if they can detect Covid-19 or just general coronavirus presence though.
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Actually, AFAIK, the Italian data comes from blood samples of patients being treated for cancer dating back to September 2019, where they didn't find the virus itself, but its antibodies, showing a possible spread of the infection dating to back then. I believe the confidence of the antibodies being specific to SARS-CoV-2 is pretty high, though I guess they could be related to a less lethal relative?
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Sure, and the harvested organ would infect the receiver with the virus.
Reading so much papers must have made you very brain damaged.
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Sorry, you sentence is in fact to difficult to parse or grasp.
What is a "teutonic commie"?
And what has organ donation via Covid death to do with prisoners?
Any hint?
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I like how you set up with the first sentence suggesting you have some regard for peer review, evidence, and the scientific method, and then somehow throw all of that away and hop on the falun gong crazy train in the next one. You're just missing the citations from the epoch times to establish 'credibility'.
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Seems so, and there was also a rise in searches for terms like "cough" and "flu" in that area.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world... [bbc.com]
However there is a flaw in your argument. The earliest confirmed cases in Europe may have been October 2019 but you are comparing apples to oranges - confirmed cases to unconfirmed cases suggested by satellite imagery and internet searches.
We need images from European hospitals and European searches to confirm. I'm sure it probably will confirm, but the work should be done.
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It is apples to oranges because "transparent data" and "Communist cover-up."
We know the value of the European data. (high quality)
We know the value of the official Chinese data. (propaganda)
We know the value of the satellite and internet search data. (low quality)
So what would be needed would be additional types of low quality data sources about China. We already have good data in Europe, and we have no idea if images of ambulances and parking lots would be comparable between regions anyways. Something as s
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Well,
the earliest cases in Europe are September in Italy. At least that was discovered by analyzing stored sewage and old blood samples.
No idea about satellite photos in China - does not really sound plausible that they had it already but did not realize it, but same happened in Italy and France - knowing that it is around.
Re: Satellite (Score:2)
It's also not clear if it's the same coronavirus or a similar related.
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Hahaha .. this is ridiculous .. do you have a link to the study of ambulance activity .. was such a study carried out to any useful standards? Anyway, if covid was so prevalent as to cause a dramatic increase in ambulance activity there is no way it would have been January for it to be detected outside China. Covid is only severe in one out of 30 cases .. so for each ambulance there are about 30 other cases .. so if true there is no way in hell it would not have been worldwide causing chaos before January 2
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Hahaha .. this is ridiculous .. do you have a link to the study of ambulance activity .. was such a study carried out to any useful standards?
No, no, it was some people on the internet who did it, and then a bunch of Chinese people called them racist [sic] and so nobody ever talked about it in a serious way.
A few people yelled at each other, and everybody else went home. But the difference in the images was not subtle. You can count the cars. The Truth is out there on the internet.
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In other words .. the whole thing could be false .. maybe there were other explanations? The time of counting, maybe there was some accidents happening due to bad weather .. I mean who knows .. are the satellite pics even legit? Any studies have to be reviewed for those type of things.
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it was over a few weeks period, and you can use other public satellite images to verify the locations.
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The latest is that Italy has positive samples from early October that had to have spread locally in September. That's the earliest confirmed in Europe, I believe.
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That's the earliest confirmed in Europe, I believe.
Except it's not in any way confirmed.
Re: Satellite (Score:2)
Re:is he playing everyone for a fool? (Score:4, Interesting)
The most common presentation of severe COVID-19 infection is pneumonia. Pneumonia just means an infection of the lungs, and is caused by all sorts of different things. If you ever get pneumonia, the most precise diagnosis you may ever receive is "viral" meaning you didn't get better when they gave you antibiotics, or "bacterial" meaning you did. Pray it's one of those two and not fungal.
Pneumonia is very unremarkable, unless you get a cluster of cases and someone notices. With 90% of COVID cases showing almost no symptoms, and most of the rest being old people with pneumonia, it could very easily have been circulating unrecognized for quite a while.
The story could be similar to AIDS in the 1980s. The virus had been wandering around for decades until it happened to infect a bunch of people in a major American city, a bunch of whom visited the same doctor, who thought it was weird that a bunch of her patients suddenly had obscure diseases, and followed up on it.
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No. I said quite clearly that something like COVID would be unlikely to be noticed, anywhere, unless you had a cluster of cases. Wuhan had such a cluster.
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Apparently not. China just got a suspicious enough super spreader event first. You'd need a fairly large number of old people in close proximity to an infected person, who would all end up at the same hospital if they got sick though. A Chinese market is a good candidate for that: the customers mostly live in the area.
I also wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that Wuhan hospitals were required to send samples from any respiratory patients to the virus lab. It would be a prudent precaution for a biohaz