Coronavirus 2019-2020 thread (no unsubstantiated rumours!)

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Dolcevita

Major
plawolf said:
I personally think there are massive confirmation bias on the wet market origin theory because of western obsession with trying to blame China for the outbreak.

The wet market angle has been explored and examined so comprehensively now, that if it was the true source, it would have been conclusively proven already.

I think the wet market wasn’t the actual origin, but did act as a massive incubator and supercharged the spread of the virus.

We know for a fact that COVID19 can, and have infected domesticated and big cats. We can also be fairly certain that COVID19 originated in bats, but we also know there is a missing link between bats and humans.

Based on the available evidence, I would suggest that a domesticated or semi-feral cat is a seriously likely candidate for this missing link.

It is entirely possible a cat caught an infected bat and was in turn infected. It could have then passed the infection on to its owner, and/or to other animals at the wet market as it patrolled its territory/scavenged for food.

That could explain why the first known infected person had no connection to the wet market.

But the wet markets still need to be massively reformed.

The sale of live animals for consumption should be banned outright in all urban areas. If you want to eat something, you have to buy it dead and packaged.

The focus on exotic animals is wrong and does not fundamentally address the root reason of why wet markets are dangerous in terms of pandemic spread - the mixing of large numbers of humans and live animals.
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I miss the wet market. We used to be able to purchase live chicken and fish from wet market and slaughter ourselves. It was a lot more work but the meat are fresher, healthier and taste much better. In addition we have a better appreciation for the lives sacrificed to help feed us.
 
vesicles

vesicles

Colonel
getready said:
Thanks but that is just saying
The outbreak yes in wuhan that is clear already when wuhan reported large number of atypical pneumonia where it finally broke out but not the source of the virus where it started. It's clear any credible scientist cannot pinpoint it's source.

Even the up to now, the wuhan wet market theory is not widely confirmed as the source. Even fromm western edia

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Please note that the Wuhan wet market is different from the city of Wuhan and is different from the country of China. Yes, everyone agrees that the Wuhan wet market may not be THE originating location. That doesn't mean it's not Wuhan and/or China. I've made that clear in my earlier posts. Wuhan may not even be the only originating location. I've also made that clear before. Please see some of my earlier posts.

vesicles said:
If some governments want to blame the Chinese for starting the outbreak, fine! they can do that. As Trump said, the virus did come from China. As of today, most of the genomic and epidemiological studies are consistent with this conclusion. To this day, I have not seen anything convincing to say otherwise. I don't care much about any of the conspiracy theories. I want to see hardcore scientific data. To this day, I have not seen any. Before I see that, the current conclusion still stands. The virus originated in China, maybe Wuhan and some other places.
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vesicles said:
As you can see, although everyone agrees that the Wuhan seafood market may not be the only place, Wuhan should be the place where the outbreak originated.
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dratsabknihcllik

Junior Member
Registered Member
plawolf said:
It’s less the death rate and more absolute numbers of dead.

We know for a fact that only a tiny fraction of extremely likely COVID19 cases are actually tested in most western nations, with general practice of actively discouraging suspected cases from even going to hospitals unless they start developing potentially life threatening symptoms. That means western confirmed case numbers are basically worthless, especially if you want to do cross comparison analysis against Asian countries where testing is far more comprehensive.

Western attempts to boost testing is further muddying the waters in terms of statistical analysis over time.

The actual death numbers thus become the most reliable indicator of the severity of the outbreak in most western nations. Although even that is now starting to look more suspect as the scale of deaths at home and in care homes start to emerge.
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I should have added this line: assuming stats are comprehensive.
 
vesicles

vesicles

Colonel
Dolcevita said:
Pardon my ignorance but it appears that the evidence you provided to support your previous statement seems to be contradict your assertion. You mentioned that "All epidemiological data still point China as the original location. The genomic variations still have the Chinese strains as the starting ones."

Yet the evidence you provided contradicts these assertion. Direct quotes from research paper states
1. we found that haplotypes H13 and H38 might be considered as ancestral haplotypes, and later H1 (whose descendants included all samples from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market) was derived from the intermediate haplotype H3.
2. Neither H13 nor H38 has samples from Wuhan (Hubei)
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Why does everyone keep reminding me of the Wuhan wet market? I have never asserted that the wet market is the only starting place. Never! My conclusion has always been Wuhan and other places in China.

Also, with regard to the haplotypes, please check out pages 7 and 8 of the paper that I cited. Every haplotype can be traced back to a connection with Chinese cities, Wuhan, Shenzhen, etc.

As I have mentioned many times before, I have never asserted that the Wuhan wet market is the ONLY starting place. Even when I argued about why the Chinese should ban the wet markets sometime ago, I specifically said "it may not be the wet market in Wuhan, but it could be a wet market somewhere else. the chances of a virus jumping onto a human is a lot higher at these wet markets." I have never pinpointed the wet market in Wuhan as the only place. Please don't try to use the evidence of "no connection with the Wuhan wet market" against me. I have never said the wet market is the only place. I've said it 3 times. Hope everyone keep that in mind.
 
vesicles

vesicles

Colonel
Please see one of my earlier post... I literally said no evidence the virus directly came from a wet market... So please don't use the wet market on me anymore. You can click the little arrow next to my name to go to my original posts. You can see that I have not changed my posts.

vesicles said:
No need for the all caps. Yes, it has been my conjecture. I have never said it’s their conclusion. It has been my conjecture about these wet markets for years. I also admit that I have no concrete evidence that the COVID-19 came directly from a wet market. Nobody does. However, because of the amount of live wild animals congregated at any of these wet markets, statistically speaking, the chances of any contagion becoming transmissible are so much higher at these markets, where huge amount of people and wild animals gather in one small place.

It has nothing to do with the West. I’ve disliked the way wild animals are handled in East Asia ever since I watched a documentary about how people in Guangdong ate the brains of live monkeys back in the late 1980’s when I still lived in China. I still remember how the poor monkeys screamed in their cages when people scooped their brains while making yummy noises. That was a documentary made by the CCTV. I hated it. I hated it. I hated it!!! To be sure, I’m not soft. I’ve killed my fair share of animals in my lab experiments and during my hunting trips. But how animals are treated at these wet markets is beyond words. These wet markets are inhumane and cruel. I’m for the complete banning of these markets altogether. The modern Chinese have no use for it, no need for it. If they want excitement, go and do some hunting themselves.

I agree that this way of living has existed in China for centuries. However, that should not the basis for maintaining them. We’ve had many “traditions” that we’ve had to abandon for better ones. In the 1970’s, the Chinese government decided to modify the Chinese language for easy learning and faster writing. Shouldn’t the very language of your culture be maintained? but they changed it to improve the literacy of the Chinese people, hence the simplified Chinese that you see today. A wet market has so much less significance than the Chinese language. Why so hard to abandon it?
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vesicles

vesicles

Colonel
To the best of my knowledge, the strongest evidence for a non-China origin of the SARS-CoV-2 came in a new study by Andersen, et al Nat Med, 2020
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They used the apparent acquisition of a unique polybasic cleavage site in the viral genome as evidence. Such mutation would require repeated short chain animal to human jump for a long time to occur. This was what happened with MERS-CoV, when the virus jumped from camels to human multiple times over years and such frequent jumps allowed the acquisition of the polybasic cleavage site in the MERS-CoV genome. They also argue that the same polybasic mutation cannot be acquired in the lab, thus inconsistent with any of the conspiracy theories about this virus having anything to do with a lab (either a natural virus kept and maintained in a lab, or the more crazy theory of an engineered bioweapon).

Anyways, they also acknowledge that any of their assertions would have to be tested with actual samples. They suggested multiple experiments that others could test. Unfortunately, this still stays as a hypothesis and needs to be tested. As I have mentioned before, we still lack solid evidence.
 
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