COVID-19/Coronavirus Information and Support Thread (see OP for useful links)
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Barra333
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- barra333
To the folks that know exactly what they are looking for, a lab generated virus (ie a wild virus that has been altered in the lab) would stand out like a beacon. Think of it this way, if you swapped La Source and the Carussell hairpins in a racing game, the average Joe picking the game up would not really notice, but most of us would pick it up straight away. Same goes for genetically engineered viruses with a virologist.
Active cases are about the least reliable metric out there as they can be counted in all sorts of ways, which basically relies on your definition of a resolved case. Is it automatically resolved after 14 days if you aren't dead or in hospital, or is it not resolved until a contact tracer calls and asks how you are feeling? The difference between those approaches seems to be the difference between ~300 and ~1800 active cases in my city (the difference between what our local health unit and the province are reporting).
- 6,068
- Simcoeace
Canada is less densely populated than the UK ... but not really less densely populated than the US. Here's a graphic representation of Canadian population distribution. More tellingly, 90% of the Canadian population lives within 100 miles of the US border.
According to Worldometer Covid deaths in Canada are currently at 553 per million. This figure has been consistently around 40% of the US death rate for almost the entire history of the pandemic. I appreciate the fact that the statistics are not necessarily reliable or transferable from one country to another ... but the "Active Cases" stats shocked me as being so radically out-of-line.
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Yes, I know an altered virus would most likely leave some evidence of that being the case, which is why I don't give that theory much thought. I didn't even mention altered virus in my post. "Lab leak" does not automatically imply "altered in the lab".
Apologies, seems I made a mistake somewhere after looking up 20,984 deaths and 38 million pop.
ONS here do a survey to get an estimate of prevalence in the community, latest report (6 Feb) reckons about 965k in the UK currently have it (compared to 1221k four weeks ago, roughly the peak of this wave). So UK didn't get quite as high as 1.9million by that measure.
Worldometers define 'Active Cases' as (total cases) - (total deaths) - (recovered), and they note that 'recovered' is "highly imperfect" (after noting earlier that total cases is grossly underestimated). I can see now how big disparities could easily arise - UK might be quite good at testing and recording cases, but AFAIK there's no real effort put into tracking 'recovered' here at all and it isn't reported on coronavirus.data.gov.uk (I think it was at the beginning, always obviously too low to be correct. Not seen it for a long time).
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- GTP_Mars
I also don't subscribe to the idea that the virus is 'engineered', but it is possible that a completely natural coronavirus did escape from a lab after being isolated. It is also quite possible that very subtle variants of existing, natural coronaviruses were being tweaked in the lab in such a way as to produce variants that could not be distinguished from those that occur in nature. Indeed, the source of this pandemic is still (and may always be) a mystery, so it's hard to tell just how different the initial strains were to those that were around in natural reservoirs (e.g. regional bat populations) at the time.
All that I've seen about the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 is that there is no evidence that it contained any features that could not have arisen naturally, so the idea that it is engineered or tweaked in some way is technically a moot point. But what isn't clear, and what remains a possibility, is whether the source of the original infections was the result of 'normal' interactions between humans and natural virus reservoirs, or if it was the result of poor security at a Level 4 virus lab that may or may not have been working on those exact viruses. This latter point is what is worrying, because it is a known fact that the lab in Wuhan was working on such coronaviruses, and as such it is quite plausible that the initial outbreak could have been the result of either an accident or a deliberate act of sabotage.
All that I've seen about the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 is that there is no evidence that it contained any features that could not have arisen naturally, so the idea that it is engineered or tweaked in some way is technically a moot point. But what isn't clear, and what remains a possibility, is whether the source of the original infections was the result of 'normal' interactions between humans and natural virus reservoirs, or if it was the result of poor security at a Level 4 virus lab that may or may not have been working on those exact viruses. This latter point is what is worrying, because it is a known fact that the lab in Wuhan was working on such coronaviruses, and as such it is quite plausible that the initial outbreak could have been the result of either an accident or a deliberate act of sabotage.
Barra333
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That is correct, but if the virus was in the lab, but not altered by the lab it means it was isolated from the wild somewhere. It is far more likely that 'the wild' infected the world than a virologist who doesn't want to create a pandemic (either deliberately or by neglect) any more than we want to be in one. If it was from the lab by neglect, then a lab staff member would likely be in the contact circle of patient 0.
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Right, so we'll need to find CoVID (or at least something much much closer than any candidate so far) in some animal population somewhere, and then there has to be a credible connection between wherever that is and Wuhan.
I would indeed say that is more likely, but I don't agree with "far more likely", and certainly not to the point of ruling out a lab leak as a possibility. Particularly when that lab was involved in collecting bat virus samples (beyond that, I can't claim to know what they actually did there).
With an easily transmissible disease that is in many cases symptom free, it's not a stretch that contact circles from the lab (or wherever) overlapped enough to make a connection to the first hospitalized patient / the market cluster. If from a lab, then most likely a staff member was patient 0.
Whichever way it happened, there are currently a lot of unknowns.
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- 5,635
- Alabamistan
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Interesting, but I think there's a potential contradiction between "having a cleavage site that no other coronavirus has" (I don't know if that is true or not) and there being no sign of direct genetic manipulation. Perhaps we can say their theorizing does not account for how that cleavage site came to exist, if there was only an accelerated evolution method being used (which would leave no sign of direct manipulation, and presumably therefore could have occured in the wild). Honestly I'm well out of my depth here, just relying on a sniff test - in most cases when someone points at something as being a smoking gun with undue certainty, they're wrong
They are right that Trump pushing lab theories was the start of wide-spread western denial of all of them, including the less fanciful.
The BBC, having had one of its documentary teams prevented from visiting caves, did seem to get a bit more open-minded about the possibility for a while. This article has quite a number of interesting little nuggets of information.
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^ Oh man... Parker ink pen takes me back.
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- Moglet85
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This is a bizarre video IMO. Rather than offer a more balanced opinion of what may have happened he immediately assumes the lab investigation was casual and is skeptical of it, and he also cherry picks info about WHO funding rather than telling the full truth about who contributes. It feels like this video was designed to breed skepticism and enrage his viewers. Without knowing his history I don't know if this is a regular thing but I haven't seen him do this before in his videos.
- 29,354
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- GTP_Mars
I've not watched much of his videos - but what I have seen always seems to be pretty fair.
He does have a point though. The WHO investigation in China is a total farce. I think the point he is making about the UK paying airfares is a bit of a sarcastic joke about the fact that UK taxpayers like himself are helping to fund what he clearly believes to be a waste of time (and money), which it is.
Unfortunately, the WHO investigation in Wuhan is, at time of writing anyway, little more than a PR stunt for China, and it does kind of beg the question as to what the WHO are doing and why.
He does have a point though. The WHO investigation in China is a total farce. I think the point he is making about the UK paying airfares is a bit of a sarcastic joke about the fact that UK taxpayers like himself are helping to fund what he clearly believes to be a waste of time (and money), which it is.
Unfortunately, the WHO investigation in Wuhan is, at time of writing anyway, little more than a PR stunt for China, and it does kind of beg the question as to what the WHO are doing and why.
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I don't think he said "only". Otherwise, see first para below.
I think him picking out UK and US is just because that's who watches his videos mostly - he begins that with something like "that you and I paid for" IIRC. I'll give him a pass for not being pedantically accurate about something that was an aside to the story.
You might have a point if he had drawn attention to China being the second largest funder like a conspiracy theorist might, but I suspect he deliberately avoided doing that.
It's certainly not a regular thing for him to be angry, in fact I don't think I've ever seen him quite like that. Frustration with things like places not putting restrictions in place when cases are going up, or the EU being slow with getting vaccinations going, sure, but that's about it. The bulk of his content is reporting stats and studies in a fairly neutral way with only small amounts of his opinion.
I certainly don't agree that this was "designed to breed skepticism". Any sane person would've had a high degree of skepticism before watching it, so he's just mirroring that. He could easily have gone further into Dr Daszak's background and previous comments if he wanted to do that:
BBC
Finally, for skepticism to be unreasonable it would have to be either baseless (which it wasn't as he listed his reasons), or deliberately omit facts that would give confidence in the investigation. Can you tell me any such facts?
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UKMikey
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"And before we go on, I'd just say that if you're living in the United States or the United Kingdom, you paid for these guys' airfares, because we're the ones that support it" certainly gave me that impression and made me want to go and check whether any other countries contributed. It sounds like he would've been happier if it were just China that paid for it as it was a waste of money.
I'll take your word for it that his anger at their lack of findings is justified. It was kind of presented here without any kind of a summary so I didn't understand where he was coming from as I haven't seen any of his videos before and didn't want to watch a half hour video without any context.
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Granted, he could have worded that better by saying we "contributed" towards it.
Are you saying you also think it was a waste of money? Or that it wasn't and he's wrong to say that it was? Because either would be far more relevant than nit-picking over an aside.
Eh? I gave a summary that described it quite accurately, albeit with evident sarcasm. And I cued it up to the roughly 7 minute segment.
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UKMikey
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I'm saying he thought it was a waste of money. I didn't offer any opinion on it myself.
It just said watch this video. I had no idea how long it was and why I should be watching.
Look, I'm just going to ignore your posts from now on. It doesn't sound like my comments on this conversation have anything to add to the thread and I feel it'd be best for everyone if I stopped responding and concentrated on the subject matter of the thread.
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"John Campbell's video today has a look at the numerous and conclusive findings of the WHO team's thoroughly independant investigation..." Cued up at 18 minutes in to a 28 minute video.
More than enough to decide if it was something interesting to you or not, at most 10 minutes or so long, and well within the subject matter of this thread.
Which, I agree, this spat isn't. Feel free to ignore me if this is how you'll respond.
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- Simcoeace
Never mind Wuhan, they should be flying to Maidstone to investigate the evil masterminds behind the Kent Virus.
Kent coronavirus variant set to ‘sweep world’
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/11/uk-kent-virus-variant-set-to-sweep-the-world-scientist-says
Kent coronavirus variant set to ‘sweep world’
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/11/uk-kent-virus-variant-set-to-sweep-the-world-scientist-says
Joey D
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I'm a bit disappointed that the WHO is deciding to stop investigating the Wuhan lab. It seems that there is a chance that it could very well be someone who didn't follow lab protocols and either we infected themselves or had something on their person that was contaminated. I don't think it was engineered since science has provided sufficient evidence to suggest that wasn't the case, but I know people can be forgetful or cut corners on safety regardless of their culture.
I'm still not convinced that the WHO is wholly trustworthy either, especially after how they handled the early, early days of COVID. It's likely they are on some level, but I still have lingering doubts about the organization and its relationship with China. It very well might not be intentional either, but rather they're giving China the benefit of the doubt and assuming that they are forthcoming with their data. If China had been honest early on, we potentially could be in a better place regarding the pandemic, but it seems that they withheld or skewed information and the WHO accepted it.
The WHO should also be investigating other countries as well since there's some light evidence that suggests that the virus may have not originated in China. It's worth looking into since the more information we can obtain about SARS-CoV-2, the better chance we have at developing effective treatments.
I'm still not convinced that the WHO is wholly trustworthy either, especially after how they handled the early, early days of COVID. It's likely they are on some level, but I still have lingering doubts about the organization and its relationship with China. It very well might not be intentional either, but rather they're giving China the benefit of the doubt and assuming that they are forthcoming with their data. If China had been honest early on, we potentially could be in a better place regarding the pandemic, but it seems that they withheld or skewed information and the WHO accepted it.
The WHO should also be investigating other countries as well since there's some light evidence that suggests that the virus may have not originated in China. It's worth looking into since the more information we can obtain about SARS-CoV-2, the better chance we have at developing effective treatments.
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It depends on what you mean by 'engineered' though.
It's perhaps a bit tautological to say that it would be obvious to researchers if an obviously engineered virus had been created and escaped from the lab, but similarly it would not be obvious if a lab were, say, culturing naturally occurring coronaviruses and testing them for virulence, only for a particularly nasty one to then escape.
The question is not so much about the virus itself as it is about the process which led to the outbreak beginning.
A virus outbreak could still be 'man-made' even if the virus involved is entirely natural...
Joey D
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I guess I'm thinking of a synthetic-virus that was essentially constructed from "the ground up" or a virus that was extensively modified to put into bioweapons. Honestly, my knowledge of virology consists of studies I've read so I'm by no means an expert. It's just that all the studies I've seen seem to debunk the idea that SAR-CoV-2 was "built" and instead came from some natural source.
And I do think if the virus did come from the Wuhan lab, it was likely due to the lack of proper lab protocols. I don't think it was maliciously released (although I suppose a disgruntled lab tech could've released it), but I do think it's possible that a lab tech didn't follow safety guidelines and ended up infecting themselves. They then might have stopped at the market at some point, passed the virus around while buying something for dinner. Heck, it could be that they were checking their phone while working on a specimen and the device ended up contaminated. I know people can be forgetful when it comes to safety.
As for whether patient-zero was at the lab or did something like eat a bat/pangolin/whatever else, I'm not sure. I suppose it's worth noting that someone could've been bitten by an infected animal or simply consumed something with blood/urine/feces on it from an infected animal. I would just assume that if it was zoological on some level, we'd found more evidence of it in animals by now, or am I off base on that? I honestly don't know.
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Sadly this was easy to predict back when it was discovered. It is indeed to our shame that cases were at such a level that a variant of concern (VoC) was so likely to occur here, and that travel restrictions were not brought in quickly enough to keep it here. However, the big difference is that our officials were, with reasonable swiftness, open and honest about the findings.
The three main VoCs all share the H501Y mutation that makes them more transmissible, and I think we believe them to have arisen independently. Given case numbers in the US, it seems quite surprising that the same mutation hasn't independently arisen there (at least, as far as we know so far).
The good news (in relative terms, anyway) is that the UK variant does not have the E484K mutation that the others do, and may limit the spread of the others in areas where the UK variant is prevalent (pure speculation, obviously, but rational).
In Brazil they are already keeping an eye on another new variant called P.2. that may become another VoC, although it sounds very similar to P.1.:
(https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/945315 - can be read by disabling javascript or other trickery)
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- 29,354
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- GTP_Mars
I'm not an expert either, but since I have worked with live, human viruses, I probably have a different view of what might be considered 'engineered' than others. I've never believed the idea that the original pathogen in this case was engineered, but the fact is that there are people out there making some barmy things, including chimeric SARS-like viruses with new surface proteins. Such gain-of-function research is highly controversial and potentially very dangerous, and the published stuff makes you wonder what might be (and almost certainly is) going on behind closed doors.
Gain-of-function research does include chimeras and all sorts of 'Frankenstein-esque' concepts of manmade biomolecules, but it also involves studying (and potentially exploiting) the processes by which viruses evolve, mutate, infect, transmit etc., and just as natural selection can produce new functionalities, artificial selection can be done in the lab, i.e. repeatedly culturing viruses and then selecting mutants that have novel properties. It's possible that the original pathogen could well have not been 'tweaked', 'altered' or 'engineered' in any way, but it could have been cultured and selected manually because of its 'natural' properties.
SARS-like viruses were a known menace in China before 2020, and learning about these viruses (and how to deal with new ones) was and still is an area of priority, especially in China. It is also well known that such research was being done in Wuhan, so it doesn't require a massive leap of the imagination to believe that there may have been strains of coronavirus in Wuhan that were not entirely of natural origin i.e. the virus itself could well be entirely 'natural', but the fact that it still exists or ended up infecting a person may not have been.
Coronaviruses are absolutely everywhere in the natural world... and hence they are impossible to control completely. Ironically, this is part of the justification for gain-of-function research in the first place - a virus doesn't need to be tweaked by humans to be devastating, hence it makes sense to figure out how these viruses that are known to exist in nature might impact us in the future.
But the danger is pretty clear - that gain-of-function research, unless done scrupulously, could end up causing the exact problem it was intended to solve.
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In terms of behind closed doors or incomplete reporting, absolutely. Clicking through from the first article you linked (which mentions Daszak being involved with it and quoted defending the work), to the 2013 paper (Zhengli-Li Shi again) and then through to the 22 May 2020 correction, you'll see that the sequence for the chimera was not registered with the gene bank until 2 May 2020. It's reasonable to assume the registration was done in response to those making a point out of its unregistered state in their theories.
The most useful form of gain-of-function studies would presumably mimic possibilities found in nature. Coronaviruses are apparently prone to recombination and purifying selection, with that article focusing on how a bat CoV might have combined with a pangolin CoV (inside a pangolin). It's dense and I don't claim to understand the details, but it is possible to get the gist of how recombination can be analyzed and what it can do. Were that process engineered in a lab, I doubt it would be possible to identify.
But since the 2013 experiment confirmed that they could indeed create an infectious and harmful virus as predicted from theory, would that not reduce the need to produce more examples? There isn't any real hint of evidence that they continued that line of study (apart from by simulation, I mean).
Overall I don't think there's good reason to focus on it being a lab leak of a virus that was created or blended in the lab - while possible, it's difficult to make that link there without knowing (or having solid candidates for) the viral ancestors and without finding that other connections between them are not more plausible.
It's also possible - but pure speculation - that the lab somehow inadvertently leaked an otherwise relatively harmless virus which went on to blend in some market animals. Pangolin-related theories seem to come in and out of favour, but it's known that they carry a CoV that readily infects via ACE2. As that paper about recombination showed, the right mix of ancestors may have produced covid. The problem, it seems to me, is adequately explaining how (for example) a bat virus from Tuanguan could come to infect a Malayan Pangolin carrying a Pan-CoV that had the possibility of being a covid ancestor.
There's reasonable confidence that the OG SARS developed in palm civets, first cases were at a market handling them, etc. I don't know if / how confidently ancestor virus candidates have been identified for it. There was, in April 2004, a small cluster that was identified as starting with a post-grad student and a researcher in a Chinese CDC lab, so lab leaks certainly can happen even when people know they are working with a dangerous virus.
Well that's probably enough crazy talk from me... there needs to be more pieces of the puzzle on the table before anything is more than speculation. I can agree with abandoning any investigation at the lab (there's surely nothing left to find there after more than a year, if there ever was anything) but not with ruling it out.
While it was inevitable that some pandemic would come along, any particular pandemic requires it's own sequence of - probably each extremely unlikely - unique events to unfold just right.
As if nothing had been learnt froms SARS (and MERS)? And this wasn't speeding from the beginning? OK.
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