WHO Investigators Now Believe Coronavirus was 'Circulating Widely' in Wuhan in December (cnn.com) 162
"Investigators from the World Health Organization (WHO) looking into the origins of coronavirus in China have discovered signs the outbreak was much wider in Wuhan in December 2019 than previously thought," reports CNN, "and are urgently seeking access to hundreds of thousands of blood samples from the city that China has not so far let them examine."
The lead investigator for the WHO mission, Peter Ben Embarek, told CNN in a wide-ranging interview that the mission had found several signs of the more wide-ranging 2019 spread, including establishing for the first time there were over a dozen strains of the virus in Wuhan already in December. The team also had a chance to speak to the first patient Chinese officials said had been infected, an office worker in his 40s, with no travel history of note, reported infected on December 8.
The slow emergence of more detailed data gathered on the WHO's long-awaited trip into China may add to concerns voiced by other scientists studying the origins of the disease that it may have been spreading in China long before its first official emergence in mid-December.
Embarek, who has just returned to Switzerland from Wuhan, told CNN: "The virus was circulating widely in Wuhan in December, which is a new finding."
The WHO food safety specialist added the team had been presented by Chinese scientists with 174 cases of coronavirus in and around Wuhan in December 2019. Of these 100 had been confirmed by laboratory tests, he said, and another 74 through the clinical diagnosis of the patient's symptoms. Embarek said it was possible this larger number — of likely severe cases that had been noticed by Chinese doctors early on — meant the disease could have hit an estimated 1,000-plus people in Wuhan that December. "We haven't done any modeling of that since," he said. "But we know ...in big ballpark figures... out of the infected population, about 15% end up severe cases, and the vast majority are mild cases."
The slow emergence of more detailed data gathered on the WHO's long-awaited trip into China may add to concerns voiced by other scientists studying the origins of the disease that it may have been spreading in China long before its first official emergence in mid-December.
Embarek, who has just returned to Switzerland from Wuhan, told CNN: "The virus was circulating widely in Wuhan in December, which is a new finding."
The WHO food safety specialist added the team had been presented by Chinese scientists with 174 cases of coronavirus in and around Wuhan in December 2019. Of these 100 had been confirmed by laboratory tests, he said, and another 74 through the clinical diagnosis of the patient's symptoms. Embarek said it was possible this larger number — of likely severe cases that had been noticed by Chinese doctors early on — meant the disease could have hit an estimated 1,000-plus people in Wuhan that December. "We haven't done any modeling of that since," he said. "But we know ...in big ballpark figures... out of the infected population, about 15% end up severe cases, and the vast majority are mild cases."
True patient zero is lost to history (Score:4, Insightful)
We will probably never know anything like the true patient zero and I think China likes it that way.
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There's the possibility that someone in one of their labs accidentally caught it from a bat. If that was the case, good luck convincing half the population it wasn't deliberately made.
I don't really care how it started, we should count our blessings that is wasn't more deadly because the global response has been a pathetic joke. Hopefully we'll learn lessons from this but I'm not holding my breath since western governments don't seem to have learned anything much yet.
Re:True patient zero is lost to history (Score:5, Informative)
The evidence whether it was or was not deliberately made has nothing to do with tracing its origin. People who know about the technology available to "make" viruses can look at the genome compared to related viruses and conclude that it wasn't "made". So far the genome also indicates that SARS-CoV-2 isn't one of the viruses that was under study at the "labs" you refer to. That should be rechecked and scrutinized like any scientific result, but right now a "lab" origin makes no sense based on what has been measured about the genome of the virus.
Also this report is saying that any previous conclusions based on the physical proximity of early cases to a particular place in Wuhan are unfounded because it appears that it was already circulating in Wuhan, and by the time of the "early cases" near the wet market and the virus lab, there were already hundreds of cases elsewhere in the city.
If this were a murder investigation TV show, this would be the dramatic moment when the medical examiner announces that the victim was not actually killed in the prime suspect's apartment, but killed elsewhere and then brought there.
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I didn't say it was created in a lab, but bats could be an origin and so far as I know bats were used in labs in Wuhan. Hence my post.
Re:True patient zero is lost to history (Score:5, Insightful)
> People who know about the technology available to "make" viruses can look at the genome compared to related viruses and conclude that it wasn't "made"
That's not true.
"For more than a decade, The Wuhan lab scientists have been discovering coronaviruses in bats in southern China and bringing them back to their lab in Wuhan. There, they mix genes from different strains of these novel viruses to test their infectivity in human cells and lab animals."
"Alina Chan pointed out that scientists there had discovered a virus that is more than 96% identical to the COVID-19 coronavirus (RaT13G) in 2013 in a mineshaft soon after three miners working there had died from a COVID-like illness. The WIV didn’t share these findings until 2020, even though the goal of such work, Chan pointed out, was supposedly to identify viruses with the potential to cause human illnesses and warn the world about them."
"The Wuhan lab was looking for SARS-related virus, and this one was 20% different. "We thought it was interesting, but not high risk. So we didn’t do anything about it and put it in the freezer,” he told a reporter from Wired. It was only in 2020, the lab maintained, that they started looking into it once they realized its similarity to COVID-19. But Chan pointed to an online database showing that the WIV had been genetically sequencing the mine virus in 2017 and 2018, analyzing it in a way they had done in the past with other viruses in preparation for running experiments with them.
https://www.bostonmagazine.com... [bostonmagazine.com]
I mean, what are the odds that a lab in Wuhan is experimenting with a virus in 2017-2018 that's 96% similar to Covid (no other virus as similar has been found yet btw), mutating it and splicing it with other genetic material (using 'gain-of-function' research which we know they were doing) and their experiment didn't escape from that lab?
Re:True patient zero is lost to history (Score:5, Insightful)
Alina Chan pointed out that scientists there had discovered a virus that is more than 96% identical to the COVID-19 coronavirus (RaT13G) in 2013 in a mineshaft soon after three miners working there had died from a COVID-like illness.
You and I are more than 96% identical to other primates, genetically speaking.
Just sayin.
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I guess the odds are extremely high given that they were experimenting with viruses found in the wild there
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Someone in a lab, could have GIVEN it to a bat.
Sucks to be them.
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Of course it was circulating widely in December, it was getting noticed already in November.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politic... [go.com]
I'd go so far as to speculate that by December it was on every continent on the globe save Antarctica. I won't speculate on how transparent the Chinese were about it early on, perhaps in time we will know more, but I don't think they could have stopped it in any case. It is entirely likely that "patient zero" had mild or no symptoms at all, as is the case for many. By the time the
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Even presuming they were honest and competent, this thing would have spread before they figured out what was going on. It's not (or it *was* not) all *that* contagious, but it's sneaky, spreading by asymptomatic/presymptomatic individuals. By the time you figure out you have a problem it's a pretty big one, even if you know it's coming.
The politicians over there had the same instincts politicians over here had: minimize the significance. The difference is that politicians over there have a lot more power
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> It's not (or it *was* not) all *that* contagious
Sars-Cov-2 is very contagious, especially indoors where many people are congregating, like a crowded restaurant, a bar, crowded public transit.
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In terms of basic reproduction rate, it's high but not sky-high like measles.
Re: True patient zero is lost to history (Score:3)
Before lockdowns it had an R0 of around 1.5 - 4. How can it be extremely contagious if (on average) the person who gets it only spreads it to 2-3 other people over a week's time?
Is it worse that a typical flu? Sure. But it's not "that bad" like the measles or chicken pox which have an R0 of 10+
Yes but look at the number. (Score:5, Insightful)
"The more information we uncover, the more incompetent the local, regional, and federal Chinese government looks. " as compared to who ? The US were warned and did DIDLY SQUAT. FUCK ALL Only the vaccination Program redeem the US. All I see at the moment is the US trying as much it cans to shift the blame on China "don't look at our 500K death, look at China how it badly handled it ! Incompetent ! 5K death ! 90K severe case ! And heck look at those 174 severe cases in December !".
China's Covid 19 virus handling was not perfect, but compared to many western state it was great. They are utter dictator, having concentration camp, enemy of freedoms, and I pass many others, but "The more information we uncover, the more incompetent the local, regional, and federal Chinese government looks. " is utterly wrong. The more we learn, the more it is clear how badly other countries bungled it, in spite of plenty of warnings.
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Agreed.
Trump did not cause the COVID-19 virus, but he did cause the US reaction to it. 4% of the population getting over 20% of the infections is entirely on Trump.
The history books should call it the "Trump Pandemic" or perhaps "Trump Flu" as that has as much descriptive relationship to the virus as the name "Spanish Flu" does to the virus that caused the 1918 pandemic.
Re:Yes but look at the number. (Score:5, Insightful)
The Wuhan wet market is full of wild and domesticated animals of all sorts. I recall one biologist who visited that same Wuhan market a few months before the pandemic saying he counted the number of species of live animals there. It was 60 or something like that.
And these animals have to come from somewhere, be that a farm somewhere, or captured in the wild and transported. Add to that the fact that bats cover a large area when they go out to feed every night, and you see that a more plausible scenario is that a bat carrying a common ancestor to SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2, or a descendant of the former defecated, and an animal somewhere was infected. The virus mutated inside that intermediate host. Other animals from the same species (farmed or wild), were infected and more rounds of mutation and natural selection happened, before it jumped to humans.
Then one of these animals was taken to Wuhan. Or a hunter/farm-worker got infected and traveled to Wuhan, where more people were infected.
Which intermediate species (singular or plural) is yet to be found. Note that with SARS, it took two years to link palm civets as an intermediate species (pandemic first started in 2002, pandemic ended 2003, and civet link in 2004).
We know for sure that a significant portion of infections are totally asymptomatic, so it could have been undetected until it hit a crowded place, like the 11 million strong city of Wuhan.
The "gain of function" theory is being peddled by ideologues (including none other than Steve Bannon), without sufficient peer reviewed and published science behind it.
On the contrary, the consensus among virologists and evolutionary biologists is that all evidence so far supports the natural origin of the virus.
The mechanism is recombination: two viruses strains infect the same cell, and pieces from each parent get put together in the resulting virus particles. If there is better fitness in the resulting recombinant, such as better adhering to cells or better evasion of the immune system, then the new strain spreads better. You are seeing this in real time in the UK, Brazil, and South Africa variants that we are seeing now.
One more piece of info: the original SARS virus entered cells mainly through the ACE2 receptor alone, with a endosome involved. On the other hand, the SARS-CoV-2 virus' main way of entry is first latching on the ACE2 receptor, then the TMRSS2 receptor causes the spring loaded spike to be pulled and the virus particle's envelope merges with the cell memberane, delivering the RNA genome into the cytosol. The TMPRSS2 route was tested in a lab and found to be 60 X more infectious.
For SARS, people were not infectious until they were ill enough to stay at home or go to the hospital. For SARS-CoV-2, people are infectious BEFORE they develop symptoms, and thus spread it around much wider than SARS.
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"undeniably so, that the first HUMAN cluster of COVID-19 was in Wuhan, China."
I wonder if this is why the narrative was promulgated by the Chinese government that it started at the wet market in Wuhan, as a cover or plausible deniability because as you pointed out, the logical conclusion if it came from bats and pangolins, located in Yunnan, hundreds of miles from Wuhan would be that people in Yunnan would have been infected first, but that didn't happen.
Which leads to a second conclusion: that the Chinese
Is the number trustworthy? (Score:2)
Taking 174 cases, assuming a "patient zero" model, and you find that it takes about 7.5 doubling periods to get there. That's a month.
My question would be how believable is that 174 number? We know that there was some suppression of early reports of a new virus from medical staff. Was this just a few isolated cases or was it more serious than that? Even now they seem to be restricting access to blood samples that might help determine this. When you have a government behaving like this it is easy to infer that they are trying to hide something nefarious even if that is not the case.
You are wrong (Score:3)
Everybody and their grandma, the WHO team, the genetic teams all over the world, all pretty much agree to a thing : the lab origin is the LEAST likeliest origin. The lab origin is nearly solely touted by non biologist/politician. For what reason I don't know, maybe they want to put the origin of the virus as more sinister than it is, maybe they want to
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NOW, the closest natural habitat for the bats that supplied the base virus, before the spike protein "mutation", is several hundred miles from Wuhan. For the mutation to have happened spontaneously, as opposed to it being a lab chimaera, the cross-species jump had to occur in the bat's natural habitat. At that point, according to the official theory, you have the virus in existence several hundred miles away from Wuhan, and you have to explain how it GOT to Wuhan, to infect Wuhan's "patient zero". AND you have to explain how it got there without infecting anyone or anything else along the way, because the data makes it EXTREMELY clear, undeniably so, that the first HUMAN cluster of COVID-19 was in Wuhan, China.
You mean the first major city with a major outbreak. This could have run rampant through rural villages and even some towns for months without anyone noticing. It got picked up in Wuhan because you had a city large enough to feel a major outbreak, not to mention a world-class virology institute filled with people primed to look for new outbreaks.
They had help (Score:2)
Moral high ground (Score:2)
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That's the problem - the Chinese need to "save face" overrode every other concern. The fact is, the Chinese government IS
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China would prefer to have the origin as shrouded as possible. If it really came from a lab, that looks pretty awful for them, but it if didn't is that any better at this point?
Why?
I don't understand what you think the big scandal here is, that a novel Coronavirus was circulating a few months earlier than thought?
I don't go to the doctor each time I have a bad cold, and if I did I wouldn't necessarily expect them to do take samples, do you expect it to be different in China?
There seems to be this obsession with blaming China for the outbreak, and yes they could have done a lot of things a lot better, but so could most countries in the early stages of the outbreak when they had far
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How many times do we have to hear people make excuses for the CCP based on the United States' prison population?
The United States has a large prison population because we have a lot of criminal behavior, much of which goes unprosecuted or underprosecuted. Those "minor drug crimes" are often combined with property crime and violent crimes, which is where TODAY you get the most severe sentencing. Spend some time in prison in a medium/maximum state facility and you will meet the calibre of criminal from Amer
Re: Probably none (Score:2)
Not sure you are describing American prisons or America. Lets face it. Those people are in jail because they are not rich.
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"The United States has a large prison population because we have a lot of criminal behavior"
Why do you think the US has so much criminal behavior? https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
Worse when compared by state: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/g... [prisonpolicy.org]
And even more surprising, why do you think the number of prisoners (criminal behavior?) has risen 500% since the 70s? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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killing people for breaking quarantine would be silly
Yeah, killing people for cheating on their taxes is "silly" too, but China has done that.
Murdering people for their internal organs, is that "silly"? China murders so many people that they need "Death Vans" which roll around picking up convicts and terminating them without their family being permitted to see the body ever again. I wonder why that is.
Re: Probably none (Score:2)
If the usa killed people for cheating on taxes. We would be a lot better off. The majority of tax cheats are multi millionare and businesses.
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The majority of tax cheats are multi millionare and businesses.
By number, or number of dollars?
Re: Probably none (Score:2)
Probably not. America has institutionalized corruption by making it lawful, as long as you have money.
Loophole is the term we use to describe how rich and powerful people and organizations buy laws that allow them to both externalize costs to the public and not pay taxes.
You know, a 5 second Google search (Score:2)
Again, you can't achieve what Marx laid out unless you're already fully industrialized. I'm not going to suggest you read theory (as I said, I don't think Communism works, so reading theory is really just for shits and giggles) but... well... again there's that google search.
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According to you, nobody's practiced "real communism". Not that this has anything to do with the CCP covering up the emergence and spread of Covid-19 in Wuhan.
Again, probably not (Score:2)
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COVID deaths in G7 countries range from 5 (Japan) - 70 (Germany) per 100k, the US has about 140 per 100k.
That would put total deaths in China from COVID anywhere between 70,000 and 1 million.
I'm almost positive that China's healthcare system is much worse than Japan's and Germany's.
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If anyone could make 1+ million people disappear, it would be China.
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Of course if it is an American saying this, it is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. The U.S. has 4% of the world's population and 22% of its COVID-19 deaths.
And let's not mention H1N1 which originated ... where?
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandem... [cdc.gov]
(I vote to rename it "The America Virus")
Yes, and "Spanish Flu" had nothing to do with Spain really, and probably originated in the US Midwest, but almost certainly in some species of North American waterfowl.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
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That Italian study was detecting SARS-CoV-2 using antigen tests that were not controlled/validated for false positives due to other commin coronaviruses
Well, duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Our" Covid is just one strain of many, *many* that naturally circulated in that area since forever. Most of them pretty harmless, or never jumping to humans.
It was always a bad idea to eat bats. Because they got an extreme immune system, that allows them to not get sick, even if full of viruses and everything. So they are the ultimate Typhoid Marys. (Can't find the PBS Eons episode on it right now.)
The lesson is, that something like this can always happen... hell, with some new strains being worse now, it *did* happen, multiple times, in a single year... And just learn some fucking hygiene and don't eat of fuck any monkeys or bats of pangolins, Mickey!
And if some country can't teach their population basic hygiene standards, close the damn borders. Including to countries leaving their borders to them open.
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That's right, it *did* happen, multiple times in a single year... there's a UK strain, and a South African strain... yet you don't launch into stuff about
Re: Well, duh. (Score:2)
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Those variants didnâ(TM)t jump species. They are just human-to-human.
Hopefully. Jumping species is not a one way thing. We have no idea if we ourselves are infecting non-humans, but odds say the chance is very non-zero.
Quite possible many viruses bounce around and around the animal kingdom as they strive to better themselves. We are all just a big pool of potential hosts to them.
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Actually, humans are infecting minks:
https://www.the-scientist.com/... [the-scientist.com]
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The Chinese government has been shutting down these kinds of vendors. It looks like wet markets in general are on the way out, the issue is that the transition is costly because it means refrigeration is needed instead, both for storage and for transport. So it can't happen overnight.
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I assume you have some evidence of this, from a reputable source.
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Who pays for building it and running it and the refrigerated trucks everyone needs?
Maybe you think China is a communist state, in which case I have some revelations for you.
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A communist state doesn't replace what it burns to the ground. Maybe its people do, or maybe they don't, but the state won't bother with it.
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I told Ozzy that biting the head off that bat was a bad idea, I did. But did he listen? No, of course not!
Because TVs don't work like that and he had bitten the bat's head off the week before. But he probably caused some zoonotic disease!
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It was always a bad idea to eat bats.
I wonder what all those southerners were eating when America created H1N1?
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Southerners were eating moon pies when 2009 A H1N1 was created in Mexico.
OK, please explain exactly how a North American (first known case) caught H1N1 from pigs in Mexico.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandem... [cdc.gov]
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Re:No bats in Wuhan wet market (Score:5, Interesting)
The Wuhan wet market doesn't serve bats.
I have never been to Wuhan, but I have been to wet markets in Guangzhou and seen bats as well as almost anything else you can imagine. Even if something isn't displayed openly, just ask and it may be available under the counter somewhere in the market. These markets have thousands of individual vendors.
it's from Palau, in the Phillipines
Palau is not in the Philippines.
Re:No bats in Wuhan wet market (Score:5, Informative)
Geographic pedantry aside, the widely circulated video of a Cantonese speaking woman eating bat soup, is indeed from Palau in the Pacific ocean, not from China. She is a travel social media influencer.
Bat Soup is a delicacy [travelfoodatlas.com] there.
It is also a delicacy in Madagascar, Papua New Guinea [youtube.com], and parts of Indonesia [youtube.com].
Even after the pandemic, bats were still being consumed in Indonesia [youtube.com] without any qualms.
Perhaps it is an Austronesian thing then (Madagascar to Palau is part of that culture) ...
Looks like bats are not commonly consumed in China. At least not as common as pangolins, civets, and other exotic species.
Think of it: why would a Chinese woman make a fuss about eating it in Palau if it is "normal" food in China?
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The Wuhan wet market doesn't serve bats.
The "Wuhan wet market"? I think the real news of the decade is that you think that
a) There's only one we market in a city of 11 million people.
b) That you comically think you know what's being served *at the many hundreds of such markets in the city*.
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He's referring to the wet market where "patient zero" received his/her first infection (allegedly). That particular market specialized in seafood according to every on-the-ground report I viewed on the subject last year.
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The Wuhan wet market doesn't serve bats.
You say this like this was a commonly known fact and you do it in a Slashdot comment over the Internet. Clearly, it has to be true then!
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It's ok to eat "monkeys or bats of pangolins"? Any issues compared with eating typical cultivated species?
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It's ok to eat "monkeys or bats of pangolins"? Any issues compared with eating typical cultivated species?
It's a cultural thing. In China do people eat about any living thing simply because it is believed to give them strength. And yes, those who survive this mentality do come out stronger according to Charles Darwin. So we will continue to see the Chinese culture cause issues, nor was this the first time we saw a virus emerge in China. I believe this is then at the core of China's resistance to cooperate, because any concrete evidence would only inspire sanctions against China with other nations attempting to
Re: Well, duh. (Score:3)
That is not true and not even wrong.
What you describe, is a south-Chinese thing, and a joke even among northerners. Compare southern US (esp. swamp) rednecks in popular culture.
Also, other than exceptions, like bats or poisonous species or bad-tasting ones (like swans), there really is no rational reason to not eat any species, animal or plant or fungus. We are omnivores. Cultural beliefs really are just harmful nonsense.
More Information, But Not New (Score:5, Interesting)
CNN is choosing to play up the data brought back by the WHO team as a novel revelation, but it really isn't. With the detailed genomic tree of COVID samples we have known since March that before the pandemic was even identified in late December it had split into multiple major variants, and that the origin of the pandemic was in mid-November, about a month before its identification, and that at the time of first identification it was already in France, Italy, and probably other countries due to international air travel. The very high R-nought values, and low doubling times, for the early pandemic that were estimated by February indicated that the number of cases before the end of December must of been in the hundreds of thousands.
Re:More Information, But Not New (Score:4, Interesting)
In December the Virus was already in Europe. UK and/or Belgium and/or Holland. Genetic distance models are extremely good in tracing this kind of stuff. They now have so much data to work with that they can pinpoint the early "country patient zero" events with 2-3 days precision.
In any case, all of these ignore the elephant in the corner of the room. The positive sample from Barcelona sewerage plant the week after Mobile World Congress 2019 - February. 10 months earlier.
Re: More Information, But Not New (Score:2)
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"Must've been"
Or "must have been"
It's really jarring when a supposedly educated person spells like a Not Particularly Bright Five Year Old. Makes me wonder what else you got wrong in your post....
That's when the bat went into the soup (Score:3)
Lab leak hypothesis finally gaining traction (Score:2)
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Despite all of the damning circumstantial evidence that even saying it was "probable" covid originated from a lab leak in China, otherwise intelligent people dismiss all rational arguments as a "conspiracy theory".
I mean I wouldn't have believed it had I not seen seen it. That in 2020 there would be a global pandemic after numerous warnings of the possibility of just such a pandemic starting in a lab, that such a pandemic would basically shut-down the major economies of the world for over a year, kill milli
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This is why the "free speech, but for my views only, other people are bad and deserve to be censored" attitude will always come home to bite the hand that feeds it.
Life imitates art (Score:2)
When we started hearing about this virus, I had recently finished reading the book World War Z. The way in which the CCP has managed information about this deadly, contagious virus has always eerily echoed that book's portrayal of Chinese government action.
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SARS-CoV-2 is just a bit of Captain Trips ...
Of course it was... (Score:2, Informative)
At this point it seems quite clear that Wuhan was the first major outbreak, but that the virus was already circulating at low levels in many countries in 2020.
Re: Of course it was... (Score:2)
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By November/December 2019, the QAnon retards were already wondering whether CBRN masks would stop whatever it was. I'd say they guessed right this time.
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We know that can't be true since Covid is so lethal that had community spread been earlier Covid deaths (for example in Italy) would have been seen much earlier as well. Especially where there weren't health protocols in place like masks and social distancing.
Italy didn't start seeing Covid deaths in large numbers until late February, 2020.
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Were the early strains that lethal? Or perhaps it was evolving even back then, the summary mentions over a dozen strains circulating in Wuhan in December, quite possibly most of those strains were milder.
Few are going to admit they were wrong (Score:2, Interesting)
The most straight forward origin story I have ever seen is one that is considered a "conspiracy theory," but 100% compatible with the realities on the ground in Wuhan.
The virus was being studied in the lab. They were doing some tests on it to see what impact it could have on humans. Some of those tests make it more virulent. This is not the same thing as creating a bioweapon, it's legitimate science if foolish science. It broke down because the PRC underpays these researchers and there is a wet market down
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And please, STFU with demands for evidence or citations. You're not going to get one from the PRC anymore than you'd get evidence of the Holocaust from the Germans
We don't need evidence from the Germans that the Holocaust happened, we have a lot of other evidence.
Your position that no evidence is needed at all however is hardly the same, and is frankly stupid.
No, you're the one who is frankly an idiot (Score:2)
As I saidYou're not going to get one from the PRC anymore than you'd get evidence of the Holocaust from the Germans if they'd fought the war to an armistice
Did your strawman consent before you started using it to go after my argument?
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You don't really need to rationalize why you have no evidence.
The end result is the same and we will file it appropriately.
Remember boys and girls (Score:4, Informative)
China denied the WHO basic, early data. This was last week.
Anything coming out of China regarding the source is highly suspect, to say the least. And to be honest at this point I don't trust the WHO much more than the Chinese government at this point.
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Anything coming out of China regarding the source is highly suspect
And yet what came out of China agreed with what the WHO said here: That an excessive number of pneumonia cases were identified in hospitals in December. This was known back in March, it's the reason the guy who first spread the alarm started looking into a novel virus strain in the first place.
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All in the sake of our freedom to be morons
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It helps the situation by having more eyes looking at the source of the problem, for being able to identify early on any future problems. Prevention and vigilance. Otherwise "fool me twice, shame on me"
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The only reason to call it "The Chinese Virus" is because you're being a racist twat. Calling it the "Chinese Virus" does nothing sceintifically, or medically, all it does is rile up racist twats.
The virus as a name. We use names to identify different things which may have common backgrounds. Kind of like how we would refer to you as iggymanz and not "racist moron" so we can identify you from the other racist morons out there.
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Wrong, calling it "the Chinese virus" puts blame on the Chinese government. Not buying into your virtue signalling bullshit
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Even if true that the Chinese government fucked up biggly, calling it the Chinese virus reflects on all Chinese, including the ones that came here to build the railroad well over a hundred years back. It's as stupid as the people here attacking Americans because of Trump's perceived fuck ups controlling the virus. Even in democracies, the people have limited choices for government, and in most of the world, those choices are worse. Even when they vote for who they want, you get 9/11 of 1973 where the Americ
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Pointless (Score:2)
They're only beating around the bush now after China hasn't given them all the data they were asking for. Some of the investigators are now trying to save their faces, their careers and their relationship to China, but they were played exactly as was predicted. One has to sympathise with the investigators' dilemma. At first do they get stuck in quarantine for a long time, to then not get all their answers, and to go home and present findings, which say it could have come from anywhere. This moment then beco
Harvard Study (Score:5, Informative)
The Harvard study showed an increase in both physical traffic to Wuhan hospitals (from satellite imagery) and in search terms for symptoms related to COVID, beginning in August 2019.
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitst... [harvard.edu]
This study was "refuted" to some degree, by medical personnel in China who gave various alternative causes or flat-out denying the increase of physical traffic at the hospitals, or the misuse of Chinese words for the symptoms. However it is looking more and more like the study indeed shows when the initial COVID activity was increasing.
Nov 2019 (Score:2)
I got it in mid November of 2019, in the US. Of course it was already out in December! Most likely transferred to me via either Las Vegas or San Francisco tech conferences.
Worst thing I ever had, since nobody knew what it was and eventually told me it was just a cold. Treated with cough medicine only. But six months later, antibody tests proved what it was.
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February 2020 I got it, and confirmed with antibody test. I was on a train to Paris and a guy opposite me was coughing his head off. Worst sickness i've had since i was a child.
UK version in NZ (Score:3)
China July or earlier in 2019 (Score:2)
Met Panamanian who returned from China business trip in July. He was sick after. Doctors couldn’t diagnose. Finally hospitalized until he recovered. His symptoms mirror image SARS-CoV-2.
He is adamant China was infected prior to Wuhan. He still doesn’t know if he had COVID. The Dr. didn’t test him in July for COVID. But he recognizes the same symptoms COVID patients describe as exactly what he had after his trip to China.
It was circulating in Europe in late 2019 (Score:2)
I know this sounds like a Chinese-made hoax, but there was a recent (feb. 10, 2021) study by a reputable French laboratory (INSERM) showing the virus was already spreading in France in November 2019 [inserm.fr].
At the end of the day we will probably never know where it comes from, maybe the French brought it to China during the military olympic games of october 2019 [www.rtl.fr] or maybe they brought it back to France from China... Go figure.
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Your premise is incorrect. The virus did spread to the rest of China.
Numerous provinces went into lockdown in February after the Wuhan lockdown in January.
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To be fair must one say he is correct when seen from a Chinese perspective. China did not give out much information on the COVID cases throughout China and thereby made it appear as if there was no virus. The virus will certainly have spread just like it did within about every other nation across the world and will not have spared China. Only China did not want anyone to know about it and we still don't really know all the facts as China is still withholding information.
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Great idea! Make the virus glow in the dark so we can see it more easily. It's genius.