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[Starver]

The spate of transplant-requiring hepatitis cases in children has been narrowed down to an Adenovirus splurge that was caused by lockdowns to not have been caught/dealt with as simple colds in earlier childhood, plus Adeno-Associated Virus Two, which has to hitch-hike on the original Av to replicate, sort of symbiotically.

Normally, they say, it just wouldn't combine so badly, but the extra layer of cotton-wool (which probably saved many other lives, let us not forget) caused a bit of a perfect storm for introduction into unusually naive hosts once the vectors started vectorising again.

It sounds like this could be useful information, for future preventative efforts, but the details are probably still to be bashed out so I don't see attempted prophylative (active-?)cold-vaccines being given to lockdown babies, any time soon.

[hector13]

Covid originated at the marketplace, as was suggested all along.

[TD1]

Which only disproves an accidental lab origin to the virus. Not a deliberate one.

Ie, they could have deliberately released the virus in a market.

I'm playing devil's advocate, obviously. But that's probably gonna be a counterclaim.

[hector13]

It absolutely will, but that ignores the two strains discovered at the start.

Not that things like logic will placate these people.

[nenjin]

The timelines seem a little weird to me. Only because I really think I had Covid in December 2019 before it made the news. That means it would have made it from Wuhan to the center of the US in ~2 months.

I really wish I could go back in time and figure out if I actually had it or not. The only thing that makes me think it was something else is that I didn't infect either of the two people that were close to me in the ~month period where I was completely messed up. But pretty much all the other symptoms track.

[hector13]

Coronaviruses seem to have similar symptoms across the board, from my very limited knowledge. I’m pretty sure the common cold and ‘flu are coronaviruses.

[TD1]

Ah! But the two strains were to ensure it caught on. Or they're a myth propagated by the media/government. Or pretty much any logic which justifies their position.

It's a bit like arguing religion, really.
The only limit to your opponent's ability to outfox you is their imagination.

The timelines seem a little weird to me. Only because I really think I had Covid in December 2019 before it made the news. That means it would have made it from Wuhan to the center of the US in ~2 months.

I really wish I could go back in time and figure out if I actually had it or not. The only thing that makes me think it was something else is that I didn't infect either of the two people that were close to me in the ~month period where I was completely messed up. But pretty much all the other symptoms track.

I've heard a lot of people say something similar. My parents, in fact, had covid-symptoms before it should have been here. As for the infecting others... covid's an odd one.

My sister-in-law acted on her symptoms ridiculously late. She was coughing and spluttering around us for days, and had trouble breathing. I spent a day in the car with her. She hugged my parents.

The only person who got it was my brother. And he had to be sleeping next to her.

[Loud Whispers]

I think it's a no brainer that Covid made it to the USA or the UK much sooner than was actually reported; cases appeared in Vietnam from China, a fashion show in Vietnam brought it to Milan, and there were non-stop flights between the UK and Milan before politicians even began arguing whether the virus was real/really a problem/really a problem we could deal with/really a problem we could deal with but couldn't because we didn't do anything in time

[Vector]

The thing is that the outbreak was announced when we started having a mass-death and mass-disability event, which we know would mean VERY LARGE case numbers causing these kinds of problems for a relatively small percentage of people. It's not freaking Ebola where a very small number of cases relatively speaking would cause a fairly similar number of catastrophic deaths. So we should be looking at a staggered effect: similar disruption in the US to the beginning of the outbreak in China at first, then eventually following up.

No lockdowns didn't mean no or little disease, it just meant that the disease wasn't in danger of collapsing the medical system at that time. There had to have been community spread. It shouldn't surprise anyone who lived fairly near an international airport that they would have been exposed, on the early side.

[Frumple]

Coronaviruses seem to have similar symptoms across the board, from my very limited knowledge. I’m pretty sure the common cold and ‘flu are coronaviruses.

the common cold is like a dozen different things (and by a dozen different things I mean there's over 200 identified viral strains attributed to causing it, from a quick wiki check), among which are coronaviruses, yes. The other major virus families involved are rhino-, adeno-, and entero-.

Flu -- influenza -- is specifically a different family of virus, though. No orthocoronavirinae involved. So you're half right, I guess?

[scriver]

Maybe I didn't read the article thoroughly enough but I don't see how what it said disproves an accidental lab spread. I have always assumed that if it was true that it was a lab accident that it would have spread to the market. A "lab accident" is not in itself a super spreader event. Somebody getting infected, going to the market during heavily crowded hours and spreading it to people there, that would be a epidemic causing event.

There's also the possibility that it was a lab accident with a strain that could not infect people, but could infection animals, and that it somehow got spread to the animals at the market, and then it mutated to being able to infest people.  Ut hey, occam's razor to the what if moustache and all that.

Then lastly it's also the issue of "confirmed cases" seeming like a very easy way to get selection bias (is that the term?) about when it started. How would you prove that it hadn't already been in circulation among a small amount of people before it spread through the market, especially when corona viruses manifest so much like each other and the new strains very likely would have been written off as just some  bad vold or standard influenza before it started to become clear that it was a new disease/strain?

I'm not playing devils advocate here but I'm not some hard believer in a lab origin conspiracy either, these are just my spontaneous thoughts about the article.

[heydude6]

Last time I looked up the state of coronavirus origin research, the article I read said that China had stopped cooperating with outside researchers due to how the virus had become politicized, and that a lot of valuable time had been lost. It said that there was a pretty good chance that the origin was never going to be found at this point, and that even if could be, it would take at least a few years.

With the above in mind, I'm surprised an article like this even exists so soon, but having read the content of it, I think I understand why. When it comes to pandemic origin research, scientists don't just want to know where people first started getting infected since that's relatively easy, but where the virus itself came from. If the virus entered the market through an imported animal, scientists want to know from which region of China that animal came from, ideally the name of the town where that animal was first captured. If the virus entered the market through a lab leak, then scientists want to know from where that lab had collected the sample.

Generally, this is done by going out into the wild and comparing the genomes of the coronaviruses present in those animals with the one of our strain of interest. If we find a sufficiently similar match then we have our answer. As you can imagine, this takes a lot of time. Especially since China is so vast.

This article isn't interested in that though, all it wants to do is to shut down the lab leak conspiracy theory. Calling it pandemic origin research is an insult that hides the fact that China killed off any possibility of real pandemic origin research being done.

[Starver]

There's the interesting fact that actual environmental traces were found concentrated all around one particular quadrant of the the market. Difficult to get if it was being shed by a single 'patient zero' visitor from the lab unless they had been camping out in that section. It'd smear out much more if a single (no-/few-symptom) carrier had visited several times to inadvertently shed a viral load over everyone and everything he came into contact with during visits.

And that area relates to where a particular subset of animals (and suspected animal-sources) were caged, which does give a "camping out" effect where an ill animal that nobody noticed/cared about infected neighbouring animals and surfaces and the generally miasmic air around them all.


Yes, a deliberate infective event could emulate this (dab a little here, dab a little there, move around, mix it up a bit, get out of there) but the presence of two distinct strains seems to work against this theory. You'd suspect either a single chosen strain that you're happy to inflict upon the public, or else a whole mix of possible candidates, letting real world conditions do the final bit of selection after you found a general group of mutated strains that did what you wanted to do but hadn't yet had the ability to properly assess any in vivo (human) trials.

That two distinct strains were seen looks more like two slightly separated animal populations had developed their own subtypes from an original strain and at least one mutation away from it, then the captured creatures from both subpopulations had been both shipped into this market, at least one ill creature from each locality, and then the 'lucky' crossover happened from one or both to create the infective-beachhead from which the fully human-compatible result then emerged.


There are other arguments, and certainly the initial denial/exclusion/lockdown of studying the outbreak did not help, but my reading is that the imperfect information this particular analysis had to work with is far more compatible with the accidental animal-vector theory than any practical anthropogenic version that could be realistic. They're not impossible, but would have to be very contrived (deliberately or otherwise) to give this particular fingerprint/footprint remnant.

[None]

I'm getting a Pfizer booster today to complete the trifecta! It's been nine months since my last booster and I've got some important dates coming up soon here. With no word on when newer coverage on the omicron variants comes around, I figured I'd best at least be fresh up. Gonna be a miserable weekend, though...

[scriver]

I'm also going to get my third one (or fourth? I can't remember) now that my tick brain inflammation vaccine has been filled up for the season since like... shit it's been two months already. But I keep forgetting to book a time.

Here's to you having a lighter reaction this time around None. I assume the other two were bad.