Originally Posted by
Skeptic Ginger
That's a serious misunderstanding of the origin of SARS. And just what do you think they were doing with all these coronavirus strains in the Institute?
Huh? What?
Originally Posted by
Skeptic Ginger
Let's look at your hypothesis sans your incredulity sarcasm. And you really shouldn't dismiss the 'face saving' in the Chinese culture when there are so many papers written on how it makes medical research from China of uncertain value. But whatever...
You posted a link to the Lancet that said nothing about face, and then one blog post written by some random laowai called China Mike that you said was a "paper" on the topic.
This is not
evidence. It's an ac hoc narrative to support a hypothesis which I am not necessarily ruling out (although the WHO scientists who visited Wuhan
are ruling it out, so I feel a little arrogant even allowing it to be an option for me), but want to see some actual support for.
Besides, what I really want you to do is post some support for your claim that scientists in Wuhan got sick.
I would be happy to see some independent and reputable source on this. That blog post is not even relevant, let alone reputable. The "fact sheet" from the Trump State Department (neither reputable nor independent) involves unsourced claims that you haven't even tried to substantiate.
Originally Posted by
Skeptic Ginger
Moving on: SARS 1 was traced to a wet market. SARS 2 was not traceable to the Wuhan (sea food) wet market it was initially thought to have originated in.
Hint: it's not about train stations or even population hubs. Surprisingly, we actually have a pretty good idea how SARS got to the Guangdong wet markets.
This is a false dichotomy. Who said it had to be the wet market or bust? Major transport hubs involve lots of people. There could be people travelling from all sorts of places, by rail or by air. They may be people who got infected and passed on the virus. Given that there are many asymptomatic carriers we simply don't know whether someone carried it into Wuhan after it had been circulating elsewhere in the country.
It seems that the scientists themselves are still considering the wet market:
Quote:
What can you say now about the market and what you saw?
The market closed on the 31st of December or the 1st of January, and China C.D.C. sent a team in of scientists to try and find out what was going on. It was a very extensive study, swabbing every surface of this place. We knew early on that there were 500 samples collected, and there were many positives, and in that sampling were some animal carcasses, or meat. But there was not really much information publicly about what had been done. So we got all that information. And that, to me, was a real eye-opener.
They’d actually done over 900 swabs in the end, a huge amount of work. They had been through the sewage system. They’d been into the air ventilation shaft to look for bats. They’d caught animals around the market. They’d caught cats, stray cats, rats, they even caught one weasel. They’d sampled snakes. People had live snakes at the market, live turtles, live frogs.
Rabbits were there, rabbit carcasses. A farm with rabbits could have been really critical. There was talk about badgers, and in China, when they say badger, that means ferret badger. It’s a mustelid, related to weasels. Animals were coming into that market that could have carried the coronavirus. They could have been infected by bats somewhere else in China and brought it in. So that’s clue No. 1.
There were 10 stalls that sold wildlife. There were vendors from South China, including Yunnan Province, Guangxi Province and Guangdong Province. Yunnan Province is where the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2 is found in bats. Guangxi and Guangdong are where the pangolins were captured. They had close viruses.
You’ve got animals coming in to the market which are susceptible. Some of these are coming from places where we know the nearest relatives of the virus are found. So there’s the real red flag.
Now the Chinese group did swab those animals, and they were all negative, but it’s just one small group of animals in the freezer that were left behind. We don’t know what else was for sale there. So these two clues are really important.
Link
Anyway, the guy being interviewed suggests a number of possibilities including:
farm-meat being sent to market
human transmission from outside
wildlife farms
And he also raises the possibility of fur-farming, particularly given that mink has been known to be infected.
Another suggestion he raises is raccoon dogs
Quote:
What is the next step?
For the animals chain, it’s straightforward. The suppliers are known. They know the farm name; they know the owner of the farm. You’ve got to go down to the farm and interview the farmer and the family. You’ve got to test them. You’ve got to test the community. You’ve got to go and look and see if there are any animals left at any farms nearby and see if they’ve got evidence of infection, and see if there is any cross-border movement. If the virus is in those southern border states, it’s possible that there’s been some movement across neighboring countries like Vietnam, Laos or Myanmar. We’re finding more and more related viruses now. There’s one in Japan and one in Cambodia, one in Thailand.
For the human side, look for earlier cases, for clusters; look in blood banks for serum, if possible. Anything like this is going to be sensitive in China, and it’s going to take some persuasion and diplomacy and energy for them to do that because, to be honest, looking for the source of this virus within China is not a great, high priority I think for the Chinese government. Anywhere this virus is shown to emerge is a political issue. That’s one of the problems, and that is clear and obvious to anyone who has been looking at this.
Do you have a particular animal that you suspect right now as an intermediate link, more strongly than others?
It’s too up in the air. We don’t know if civets were on sale. We know they are very easily infected. We don’t know what the situation is with the mink farms in China or the other fur farms, like raccoon dogs, even though they’re normally farmed in a different part of China. That needs to be followed up on, too.
But if you were to say which pathway would you put the most weight on, I think the virus emerging either in Southeast Asia or Southern China from bats, getting into a domesticated wildlife farm. I’ve been to many of these, and they often have mixed species — civets, ferret badgers, raccoon dogs. Those animals would be able to get infected from bats.
Either the people that work there get infected and bring it in, or animals are shipped in, live or recently killed, that bring the virus into a market. Once it’s in a market — either Huanan or another one in Wuhan — you’ve got a dense population of people moving through those markets. And it’s going to be a real potential for an amplification.