How the Covid Pandemic Almost Didn't Happen (cnn.com) 176
"If that first person who brought that into the Huanan market had decided to not go that day, or even was too ill to go and just stayed at home, that or other early super-spreading events might not have occurred," says Michael Worobey, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. "We may never have even known about it!"
Worobey worked a new study published in the journal Science, which CNN describes as concluding that "The coronavirus pandemic almost didn't happen." Only bad luck and the packed conditions of the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan — the place the pandemic appears to have begun — gave the virus the edge it needed to explode around the globe, the researchers reported in the journal Science. "It was a perfect storm — we know now that it had to catch a lucky break or two to actually firmly become established," Worobey told CNN...
The team employed molecular dating, using the rate of ongoing mutations to calculate how long the virus has been around. They also ran computer models to show when and how it could have spread, and how it did spread... The study indicates only about a dozen people were infected between October and December, Worobey said... What's needed is an infected person and a lot of contact with other people — such as in a densely packed seafood market. "If the virus isn't lucky enough to find those circumstances, even a well-adapted virus can blip out of existence," Worobey said.
"It gives you some perspective — these events are probably happening much more frequently than we realize. They just don't quite make it and we never hear about them," Worobey said...
In the models the team ran, the virus only takes off about 30% of the time. The rest of the time, the models show it should have gone extinct after infecting a handful of people.
Worobey worked a new study published in the journal Science, which CNN describes as concluding that "The coronavirus pandemic almost didn't happen." Only bad luck and the packed conditions of the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan — the place the pandemic appears to have begun — gave the virus the edge it needed to explode around the globe, the researchers reported in the journal Science. "It was a perfect storm — we know now that it had to catch a lucky break or two to actually firmly become established," Worobey told CNN...
The team employed molecular dating, using the rate of ongoing mutations to calculate how long the virus has been around. They also ran computer models to show when and how it could have spread, and how it did spread... The study indicates only about a dozen people were infected between October and December, Worobey said... What's needed is an infected person and a lot of contact with other people — such as in a densely packed seafood market. "If the virus isn't lucky enough to find those circumstances, even a well-adapted virus can blip out of existence," Worobey said.
"It gives you some perspective — these events are probably happening much more frequently than we realize. They just don't quite make it and we never hear about them," Worobey said...
In the models the team ran, the virus only takes off about 30% of the time. The rest of the time, the models show it should have gone extinct after infecting a handful of people.
Gain of Function (Score:3, Insightful)
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But remember! That's a crazy /conspiracy theory!/ Even though we know the BSL-4 lab in Wuhan WAS doing research on bat coronaviruses. And even though we know the CCP made it illegal for any scientist in China to research the origins of SARS-CoV-2. And even though we know the WHO team was repeatedly disallowed from visiting the epicenter, time enough to obscure the truth. But you know, BELIEVE SCIENCE!
Re:Gain of Function (Score:4, Insightful)
It's an area with a lot of bats. Those bats are frequently infected with coronaviruses. So, you're proposing what? We not study those viruses, or study them somewhere else?
Your theory is a bit like thinking there must be sinister motives behind ebola outbreaks because ebola is being studied in the places where there are outbreaks.
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It is not. Most of the bat coronavirus samples, including COVID-19's closest-known relative, were from caves in Yunnan province, 1500km away. It's akin to saying that because there's a big bat colony in Tennessee, that an outbreak in Ottowa must be connected. There are no bat colonies in Hubei [researchgate.net]. The nearest bat colony is an isolated one in southern Jianxi, ~650km away, not connected to any coronaviruses of note. Same story about 650km away in the other direction in Shaanxi. "Bat central" in China, howe
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The cave is far out from society [nature.com]. It might be a good idea to talk to the relatively few people in the region and find out where they traveled during October-December.
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Sorry this is wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The bat whose extracted virus in 96% similar to covid.
You can clearly see that they can be found on central China. Where's Wuhan? In Central China.
Moreover to say there's no bat colonies in Hubei is also clearly wrong. Google BAT COLONIES IN HUBEI, and there's papers about bat colonies in Hubei.
This doesn't even account for the fact that Wuhan was a metropolis and its centrality meant that many people as well as products from different parts of China
Re:Gain of Function (Score:4, Interesting)
There are no R. affinis colonies in Hubei [bris.ac.uk]. Thanks for playing.
And to reiterate: COVID-19's closest known relative was isolated from bats in Yunnan province, 1500km away.
There is no evidence that anyone in Yunnan, or anyone else, had the disease before it emerged in Wuhan (Hubei).
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You mean there's NO KNOWN colonies from a extremely old 1997 study. Lots can change within 20-30 years, especially before SARS became a major event, and bat research became an important effort in China. Citing such old reports is disingenuous at best. Furthermore, even from this 1997 study, we can see that the nearest known colony in 1997 is only a couple hundred miles away from Wuhan means that what you're saying is bogus bullshit when you're trying to say they are located a 1000 miles away. This does
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You're postulating imaginary unnoticed bat colonies in a densely populated part of China, and you're calling me a conspiracy theorist?
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You're postulating that colonies are 1500km away when they are 150 km away per your source? Nothing but a conspiracy theorist creating conspiracies without any basis in reality. Maybe you need your eyes checked.
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Where's Wuhan? In Central China.
Moreover to say there's no bat colonies in Hubei is also clearly wrong. Google BAT COLONIES IN HUBEI, and there's papers about bat colonies in Hubei.
This doesn't even account for the fact that Wuhan was a metropolis and its centrality meant that many people as well as products from different parts of China as well as world were going through Wuhan, because its central location as well as being right on the Yangtze river, and being a place where tons of trains pass through.
If you look at the range image on the Wikipedia page, Wuhan is actually located at the bottom of the grey 'U' shape to the west of the top-right red area. So Wuhan is outside of the the bats' range.
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See https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
The wiki image is probably based on an old 1997 study. And even if Wuhan is "out of range", the nearest colony is within 100-200 miles, not as Rei suggests, where Wuhan is the biggest city by far in the area.
Re: Gain of Function (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the lab wasn't engineering viruses for the Chinese military. No, they normally did not deal with live samples. No, there isn't some Grand Conspiracy. But for the Chinese to immediately claim NO possibility of a link without any investigation or transparency ought to raise eyebrows.
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even asking the question "could it have come from the lab" is instantly met with name-calling and blanket claims that such a thing is impossible.
Probably because the theory has been examined and rejected, yet the Q-crazies keep quacking on about it and people are now sick and damned tired of the constant quack quack quack. It's gotten old.
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Did the coronavirus leak from a lab? These scientists say we shouldn’t rule it out. [technologyreview.com] by Charles Schmidt, MIT Technology Review, March 18, 2021.
It's very interesting that this article came out just in the last week, published by that bastion of conspiracy theories MIT, no less.
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Yet that article also discounts the idea that the virus was engineered. The comment that started this thread alleges conspiracy complete with suggesting that the alternative theories are deliberate smoke screens.
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They're happy to vote against their own interests and blame someone else when it goes badly.
Re:Gain of Function (Score:5, Informative)
After the SARS-COV-1 fiasco gave us caution, we actually had American scientists working with the Chinese scientists at the Wuhan Lab on cataloging all of these potentially dangerous viruses. But it was our anti-science leaders that pulled the plug on funding and forced us to leave that project behind, with zero oversight at that lab, and exactly when we should have been increasing funding and pooling our efforts to researching and track the growing pandemic. After we left China and our pompous leaders started blaming the Chinese for creating the virus, it's no wonder why the Chinese government is not so forthcoming with information. They then stopped trusting our scientists as they are now believed to be only politically motivated. We screwed them politically and now the channels of scientific collaboration and communications are blocked by politics.
What did we learn? In 2013, there was something like 193 variants of coronaviruses collected out of one single cave from the local bat population right near Wuhan. None of those collected viruses was sars-cov-2 but between the total of all of them, almost all the genetic fragments were found except for the human-like ACE-2 sequence. Bats don't have human-like ACE-2 receptors so we know there was some other intermediate species involved in the progression/evolution of this virus before it jumped to humans. A VERY likely candidate is pangolins who share genes similar to our human version of ACE-2 receptors and pangolins often share cavities in trees with at least 5 of the local bat species. Co-occupancy virtually guarantees that the pangolins would be covered by bat excrement on a daily basis, and bat guano is known to be very rich in live coronavirus. All that was needed for the pandemic was one pangolin to be infected by two or more viruses simultaneously and out pops sars-cov-2 and that lethargic pangolin easily gets captured and carried off to the Wuhan marketplace. Game over.
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Except they tested all the live animals and none of them were infected. It came into the market a different way
They were there testing on day zero? It was many weeks before they even knew they had a problem before any testing happened. Many of the live animals probably died of old age before then.
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A large proportion of the initial cases in late December 2019 and early January 2020 had a direct link to the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market in Wuhan City, where seafood, wild, and farmed animal species were sold. Many of the initial patients were either stall owners, market employees, or regular visitors to this market. Environmental samples taken from this market in December 2019 tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, further suggesting that the market in Wuhan City was
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And the story - that underpaid lab techs supplemented their income by selling, in the exotic animal market a few blocks away, some of the lab animals they were supposed to kill and incinerate - is just a rumor , propaganda, or another tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory. Right?
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Re: Gain of Function (Score:3)
Except there is no new function in it. Itâ(TM)s basically a very slightly mutated form of existing coronaviruses that cause respiratory illness.
There are no new genes or anything like that. Frankly if a human designed the virus they should be fired for incompetence. For one thing, there are a plethora of innovations that could be added to the virus to make it a lot better. For example, the immune evasion genes are nowhere near the best thatâ(TM)s out there. I mean, anyone with basic virology knowl
Re: Gain of Function (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry, but "a very slightly mutated form of existing coronaviruses that cause respiratory illness" is "gain of function". That it's probably a natural mutation doesn't keep it from being "gain of function". It's what you expect a virus to do, but it's still "gain of function".
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I hate to break it to you but gain of function research happens every day in most virus research labs. The virus is made to infect new cells that it does not already infect, in different animals. Not much gain of function research is done on making viruses more fit in humans because of the obvious risks it is true but gain of function is routine for all sorts of reasons. That is why BSL4 labs get built. Gain of function happens all the time in the wild, as a virus passages though animals and humans it adapt
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Or you can inadvertently cause the next pandemic, which is why there are scientists warning against using gain-of-function research to create live virii.
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False: https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
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Corona viruses work just fine without the furrin cleavage site. We still do not understand all the pathways Corona viruses use to infect cells. That alone makes the design thing daft. A year after it started we still don't understand how it works. Even if it had been a lab escape then the virus is still around along with countless others so not doing research still leads to the same outcome - more pandemics. If you think it was a lab escape then you should be campaigning for vast increases in funding of vir
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If the Wuhan lab wasn't doing gain of function "research" on bat coronaviruses, none of this would have happened. The disgusting market is just a smokescreen.
The previous H1N1 pandemic was started by an American after he "visited" some pigs in Mexico.
Your point was? [cdc.gov]
Unreal (Score:2)
This whole conversation drives me batty.
What is it with Republicans and Democrats standing back to back, but insisting they're thousands of miles apart just because they're facing in opposite directions?
"Coronavirus" is sort of a buzzword here (Score:4, Informative)
The CNN story has very little to do with the Science paper, other than using it as a tangential jumping off point to talk about how disease outbreaks either happen or don't happen.
It's interesting in a "muse about it over your morning cup of coffee" way.
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If Klara Hitler had a headache on the night of July 20th, 1888, WW2 would have never happened.
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And if my aunt had balls, she'd have been my uncle.
The pandemic didn't almost not happen. If it wasn't the guy who wound up as Patient Zero, it would have been someone else.
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And if my aunt had balls, she'd have been my uncle.
The pandemic didn't almost not happen. If it wasn't the guy who wound up as Patient Zero, it would have been someone else.
You are missing the point.
There are plenty of patient zeroes all the time. Not all of them initially spread it to enough people to cause a global pandemic.
A lot of the time the virus dies out before spreading very far, or at all.
Jennie (Score:2)
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Unlikely.
Someone else had lighted the fuse ... probably another German, but perhaps someone else.
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Or alternately, the Germans could have won because they would potentially have had a more competent military strategist in charge.
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Nazism has nothing to do with socialism beyond co-opting the word for its purposes. Socialism stands completely opposed to fascism in all forms. In conflating the two you are doing the fascists' propaganda work for them.
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Or it might have happened many times already... (Score:2)
Just that 2020 was unlucky and got caught...
highly probable (Score:3)
Here's the thing about statistics: It's highly probable that a very unlikely event will happen. There are many, many improbable events and the math says that if only one of them need happen then the total probability is the sum of the individual ones. They add up. So it's probable that a very unlikely event will happen. We just can't know in advance which one.
What would an odds-maker say (Score:4, Interesting)
So if it didn't happen then and there it would have happened eventually. The virus was in circulation, and one of the highly successful features of this particular virus is that its kill rate is low enough that the community doesn't take action against it immediately. It must have been present in many carriers that didn't know they had it.
So it would have spread eventually.
The most fortunate part of it is that it ended Trump's presidency in the U.S. If it happened six months later Trump would have been re-elected.
Re:What would an odds-maker say (Score:5, Interesting)
I think you got that backwards. Trump had a lot of horrible mistakes that came close to destroying him. The GOP kept supporting him despite this, and the rest of the country knew it.
Every presidency has these kinds of tests.
It was not lucky for the world that it happened in the last year of his presidency. Instead it was lucky for Trump that he managed to avoid similar stuff happening during the first 3 years.
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Instead it was lucky for Trump that he managed to avoid similar stuff happening during the first 3 years.
The Republican establishment and base (other than a tiny minority of it) has made it abundantly clear that they were all in and would support Trump no matter what he did or what developments occurred.
Had the pandemic started six month earlier I don't see that much would have changed with regard to Trump's political prospects. The difference would be that even more people would have died or have been injured by the virus. Reasoning: because of Trump's insistence that the federal government should have n
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So the pipeline would of been completed in 2-3 months?
The other way to look at it (Score:5, Insightful)
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I look at this from the perspective of having a little engineering background; 'nature' seems to be full of negative-feedback, therefore self-regulating mechanisms. Why should population of any species be any different?
Because "nature" is not sentient, nor is there any sort of unified goal.
There's too many humans alive at once. This coronavirus outbreak
It's not a human virus. It's a virus that infects a variety of mammals. Human presence was not required for it to form, nor will human infections be required to sustain it. COVID-19 will always be around due to the non-human hosts, and we will have to add an immunization to the standard immunization schedule.
The low death rate means it would have spread globally even if human travel happened at the same speed as 100AD. It just would
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The stupid is attempting to apply engineering to biology, and then having a hissy fit when someone points out the problems with it.
Engineering inherently requires sentience - the components and arrangement are intentional. For something to be a "negative feedback loop", there has to be a target for that loop. Something has to set that target, so now you're requiring sentience.
Biology is probability, not engineering.
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We have too many people packed too close together
This statement requires someone to decide what "too many people" is, and what "packed too close together" is, because we're nowhere near the natural limits on those.
We've lived at higher densities than we currently live - when we walked everywhere we were much less spread out. There's also a massive variety of densities, Wyoming vs. the slums of Hong Kong, for example. So the idea we've suddenly hit some sort of natural limit on density is very problematic.
As for too many people, we're nowhere near the pr
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Your post reminds me of this xkcd comic, from the early days of the pandemic: https://xkcd.com/2287/ [xkcd.com]
We're encountering these negative feedback loops (climate change, pandemics), and are doing a remarkably good job of finding ways to make sure that they don't cramp our growth too much (renewable energy tech, mRNA vaccines). I also don't see any scenario in which covid-19, left unchecked, would have "completely wrecked our entire civilization." It would have killed a lot more people, but not enough to cause
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When HALF your population OR MORE is down sick at the same time, what happens to your ECONOMY? It crashes and burns.
Now what happens when everyone is getting sick from it MORE THAN ONCE? Bye bye civilization, no one well enough to keep it running.
Now what happens when people are dropping dead from it more and more because they keep getting sick from it (because no one is bothering to do anything to stop it, or has the means
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And it will happen again. We need to start preparing now for the next pandemic, and get (or keep) the control measures, supplies, and rapid development vaccine pipelines ready.
The mRNA vaccines are easy to design and can be quickly devised to address new coronaviruses. Now that we have these treatments validated, and production facilities in operation, we should be able to start distributing new vaccines within weeks of a new organism appearing.
Also maybe we start taking test development and use seriously.
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The response is the same after every pandemic, then a few years go by and the politicians find other things to spend money on. As private industry doesn't have any motivation to keep stocks of stuff that isn't currently being used around, only the government can keep stocks of supplies ready and they failed after the last time, stocks of expired masks etc. My country allowing the vaccine manufacturers to move to China as they could do it cheaper.
The mRNA vaccines are a bright spot, but new ones will still n
Like wow (Score:1, Funny)
And a casual difference or two could have prevented Hitler's parents ever meeting and then Godwin's law would be completely different.
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Yes, that is funny. And also a valid point. The summary even hints at that with
The more important question... (Score:2)
Is how many times did a pandemic almost happen, but didn't?
When playing Russian Roulette, it doesn't matter how long a hot streak you have going for you. Eventually you're gonna lose.
And if Chinese government didn't cover it up (Score:4, Insightful)
The outbreak could have been possibly contained in Wuhan or in China, or at least delayed enough for vaccine to come before much mortality. That's even discounting any nefarious research that made a natural virus worse.
If America still had boots on the ground in China (Score:3)
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Sorry, but that's wrong. Also misunderstanding what happened.
What happened: A local bureaucrat wanted to look good to the higher-ups, so he suppressed bad news that he didn't expect to be as bad as it was. (Yes, he was excessively forceful in his suppression, and yes, that's a bad policy, and yes, it's common in China, but it wasn't a government policy that caused the problem...unless you mean their whole style of government, in which case the US response doesn't look any better WRT this event.)
But when
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World-wide transportation/movement happened (Score:2, Insightful)
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Not this time. The two week latency before symptoms show up allow anything much faster than a cross-pacific ship to carry it around and share it without problems.
Usually, though, I pretty much agree with your sentiments, and certain the faster the transport the more rapidly diseases spread.
Failure of leadership (Score:4, Insightful)
You know how SARS, MERs, Swine Flu, Eblola, etc. didn't become a pandemic like Covid? It's because of a complete failure of leadership by the Trump administration.
For a century, America has been telling the world that in the event of a crisis the world should look to the US for leadership. And we have made that claim with credibility. Covid is not the first global crisis the world has seen. In previous crisis we have provided the international leadership and science to manage and mitigate the problems and prevent catastrophe.
But, when Covid struck, and the entire world looked to the US for leadership, what they found was a bumbling baffoon who was woefully, laughably in capable of managing the crisis. Then it was clear that every nation was on their own, and thus we have the pandemic we have now.
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I don’t think it is quite fair to focus all the blame on the Trump administration for it becoming a pandemic— they had a few big mis-steps for sure and actual leadership might have reduced the impact but not eliminate it.
CDC and WHO putting as much energy into saying the primary vector of transmission was surfaces and droplets was the big mistake early on that could have changed the course of the spread dramatically.
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The CDC were trying to do their best with the information they had, but they were running uphill from the beginning because Trump had utterly failed to bring the world together to beat it back. China is certainly at fault too, but there was a brief moment in time where everyone was looking to the US for leadership and we could have staged and international effort to crush it quick -like we have done before.
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And yet, China, South Korea, Australia, Japan, and many many others have somehow successfully suppressed their spread.
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Re:Failure of leadership (Score:5, Insightful)
Germany here. We're still struggling despite drastic measures (lockdowns, app tracking etc.) that were not necessary when SARS struck. This thing is just a whole new calibre.
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Probably not. Look at SARS, a similar disease that only spread by obviously sick people. There were outbreaks in, " Toronto, Ottawa, San Francisco, Ulaanbaatar, Manila, Singapore, Taiwan, Hanoi and Hong Kong whereas within China it spread to Guangdong, Jilin, Hebei, Hubei, Shaanxi, Jiangsu, Shanxi, Tianjin, and Inner Mongolia." according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
We did eliminate it but considering how it spread even though only sick people were contagious and how easily this virus spreads even wh
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Several countries have close trading links to China.
I'm told northern Italy has a strong textile industry and they work closely with the Chinese, travel between the two areas got Covid established before the US - or practically anywhere else - had even realised there was a problem.
A Chinese woman flew to Germany and then travelled on to some small town in Bavaria in order to lead some training course at an automotive component supply company. She was not feeling at all well when she arrived but attributed
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You know how SARS, MERs, Swine Flu, Eblola, etc. didn't become a pandemic like Covid? It's because of a complete failure of leadership by the Trump administration.
Trump has nothing to do with it, or so little that it is negligible. You are giving US presidents way too much credit.
The big difference between Covid and the others you cited is that Covid has a very infectious pre-symptomatic or even asymptomatic phase. For SARS, MERS and Ebola, you just needed to take appropriate precautions around sick patients for the epidemic to die off. As for swine flu, it essentially ran uncontrolled, luckily for us, it wasn't worse than seasonal flu.
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Re:Failure of leadership (Score:4, Insightful)
But, when Covid struck, and the entire world looked to the US for leadership, what they found was a bumbling baffoon who was woefully, laughably in capable of managing the crisis. Then it was clear that every nation was on their own, and thus we have the pandemic we have now.
I think you're giving the US too much credit and Trump too much blame. Yes, a better-organized international response would likely have helped to reduce the impact, but that response wouldn't have begun until after the disease had already reached significant population in multiple countries.
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This [nymag.com] article goes into some details on how things got out of hand. It's a much more complicated matter than you might think, with plenty of blame to go around.
Really October (Score:2)
WaPo has a better article (Score:1)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/05/coronavirus-origins-mystery-china/
The wet market hypothesis is not as likely as the research lab hypothesis.
It can happen in the US (Score:2)
Where would we be without the Superspreader event? (Score:2)
A lot better off if the plug had been pulled on them earlier. But all those Trump rallies happened and then there is the current spring break.
Won't people ever learn?
no... they won't (sad fact really)
Fundamental date basis for study is wrong (Score:2)
Antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 were retrospectively detected in stored blood samples from September 2019 in Italy.
Source: Sage Journal: Unexpected detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the prepandemic period in Italy [sagepub.com]
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It's an interesting article, but something doesn't seem right.
If we accept the numbers they're showing that would indicate that ~15% of Italians had (had) Covid-19 by September of 2019, and ~15% of Italians (still) had (had) Covid-19 a month later by October of 2019. Then, for some unknown reason, the incidence dropped to virtually nothing, before climbing again to a peak of 20% in February of 2020.
Ok, I may be making a huge error in assuming that the incidence rate in those signed up to a cancer screening
A tale of two doctors (Score:2, Interesting)
Some of you may remember Li Wenlian [wikipedia.org] who was punished for "leaking" information about the virus and subsequently died from it.
You may not recall or even know about Jiang Yanyong [wikipedia.org] who in an eerily similar way leaked information to the foreign press regarding the earlier SARS outbreak. The wiki article claims this may have made a difference. The real difference might be that Yanyong is a senior member of the CCP so they didn't feel like they could attack him so easily. He even wrote about Tienamen, which is
Whew! (Score:2)
Almost happened in 2019, 2018, 2017, etc. (Score:2)
Population density up = virus success up (Score:2)
ergo as the global population increases, expect more viruses to be successful.
Viral pandemics are therefore inevitable and will become more frequent.
We've seen this in cow, pig, and chicken populations wherever we have upped the density for profit. What lessons do we take away?
Horse pooey (Score:2)
Everything that has ever happened almost didn't happen.
In addition, the assumption that the virus got spread at the market is far from proven.
Of course (Score:2)
It's pretty obvious that the emergence of infectious diseases and zoonosis is a stochastic process. Also, it's likely that there were other potential pandemics that fell the other way and didn't get out of hand.
What's more important is that all nations should acquire a baseline level of culture, and stop eating bats, pangolins and other wild animals. The Chinese should also stop their weird belief that rhino and elephant parts, ground and consumed, help restore low libido. The Japanese should stop whaling f
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