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Originally Posted by opendoor
So on the one hand it's one of the most contagious multi-species viruses ever in existence. But at the same time you think it transmitted undetected in humans long enough to go to and from a bunch of animal reservoirs, remained transmitting in the animal populations long enough to develop the different lineages (without infecting basically any humans), and then jumped back into humans where it took off quickly. That doesn't seem very plausible given the growth rates we've seen in immunologically naive human populations.
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https://www.science.org/content/arti...ading-globally
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abf8003
The fact that it's been in human populations for some time is more of a known, than a hypothesis.
But, no, that's not required in what I'm saying. That's just a small subset of possibilities. Absolutely it could have gone directly from the lab to animals and stayed there for some time. But the fact that they were doing experiments on immunocompromised mice with human lungs blurs much. As in...what do we mean by human reservoir when the experiment is on human lung tissue in mice, for instance.
Quote:
Originally Posted by opendoor
So on the one hand it's one of the most contagious multi-
And it's also at odds with basically every lab leak hypothesis I've seen. The primary foundation of most of the lab leak hypotheses is that there is zero evidence (or even plausibility) that SARS-CoV-2 spread in humans undetected for a period of time. Their whole argument is that it came out of nowhere via a lab leak, which is why it went from nothing to a pandemic in a few weeks. That doesn't really fit with the idea that it spread around in humans and animals around Wuhan long enough to generate the genetic diversity that existed.
That's basically the only legitimate and plausible theory of the lab leak. The theory is that a worker (or workers) at the lab unknowingly became infected with a coronavirus they were working on and/or that animals in the lab had been infected with. Some posit that it was a virus that an animal came into the lab infected with (the same idea as the bat virus that killed those miners in 2012), while others suggest that it was the result of gain of function research. Either way, the worker(s) would have then spread it outside the lab and it took off quickly from there.
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I will admit I have not thoroughly researched lab leak theories, but:
Whether it leaked from the lab or not, most of the theories will be factually wrong. This is just how theories go.
I'm just sort of reading what you're writing as evidence to discount theories that are human-only theories. I could have discounted them without any of the evidence above, coronaviruses have always been cross-species.
But I need to point out that disproving human-only theories (which are ludicrous to begin with) doesn't, as far as I can see, paint the Wuhan lab as innocent in any way. It just finds fault in any human-only theories pointing to it.
In otherwords discovering, quite obviously, that animal transmission is likely involved ( as it always is with coronaviruses) doesn't change the fact that the Wuhan lab was working on said animals, modifying both them and coronaviruses, where any means of accidental transmission (human, animal, combo) was entirely possible.
I'll put it one more way, and point out that I am the furthest thing from a Trump supporter: We can of course expect that a lot of bad science went into pointing the finger at the lab, for politically motivated reasons.
Bad science as it may be, politically motivated as it is, none of this changes that the lab was there and lab accidents do happen.