Quote:
Originally Posted by opendoor
For one, 96% isn't that similar; it's potentially decades of evolution. And it's also worth remembering that the 96% similar bat virus (RaTH13) was:
- collected by the Wuhan Institute of Virology
- was previously unknown and its sequence had never been published
- was only made public when researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology published their findings noting the similarity to SARS-CoV-2
If they had been manipulating that virus, accidentally leaked it, and were looking to cover that up, would it really make sense for them to tell the whole world that they had that virus in their lab? I mean, if you want to get really conspiratorial, couldn't they have kept that virus under wraps and then "found" it in a cave after the fact to support natural origin?
They found a very similar virus in civets and postulated that it passed from bats, to civets, to humans. However, it took 14 years to find an actual source, which was a population of bats that had strains of coronaviruses that were the building blocks of SARS-CoV-1, that could adequately explain the lineage. And ultimately they believe that the civets didn't play any evolutionary role, just that they were infected at a similar point in time to humans (and likely spread it to humans). So that is to say, the virus could have plausibly spread to humans without the civet's involvement, so the lack of an identified intermediate host for SARS-CoV-2 isn't inherently problematic. |
I was thinking more about the civets they found with SARS-1. The reason they were able to find them was that virtually everyone who caught SARS got horribly sick. About 11% died and a even more were hospitalized. While it's not settled, there didn't appear to be any asymptomatic spread. It would've taken only a handful of cases to be able to see something new was spreading and that small number could be contact traced back to a wet market, test all the animals and boom, you find a civet that's got it once you have sequenced the virus.
In this case, there's lots asymptomatic disease, mild disease, and a less defined incubation period. There's also the fact that it's flu season and minor respiratory illness would be fairly common. To have someone in the hospital with unidentified respiratory illness isn't uncommon, and it would've taken a few of those to see something is new. How much community spread was there at that point, and how much time had passed since the first infection? Weeks at least. It's even quite plausible the wet market in this case was simply a mass spreader event rather than the point of origin. Contact tracing for SARS-1 would've been much, much easier.