Detection of novel coronaviruses in bats in Myanmar | Hacker News Reader

Detection of novel coronaviruses in bats in Myanmar

journals.plos.org

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A speculative theory backed by purely circumstantial evidence gathered online of covid-19's origin is that chinese researchers investigating coronaviruses in bats working near the wet market in Wuhan had an accident and became infected, one who apparently disappeared and has been presumed dead.

I don't know if that's pure conspiracy theory nonsense, but it certainly seems risky to be doing this kind of thing:

> Free-ranging bats were captured, and rectal and oral swabs and guano samples collected for coronaviral screening

Especially considering the potential for asymptomatic spread...

How do you suggest research be done?

In whatever fashion you might think of, which does not endanger the lives of millions of people?

With great care and from a distance.

If we're manually catching and swabbing wild bat rectums, I don't think we're doing a good job of keeping a distance, especially considering how far technology has progressed.

Humans and bats aren't going to stop interacting, not least because guano is an excellent fertilizer and the easiest way to get it is by giving bats incentives to defecate over your fields.

That being so, and given the utter implausibility of bat-butthole-swabbing robots or whatever, would you rather we had people taking the negligible additional risk of doing this kind of research, so that we have a chance of being able to prepare in advance for the arrival of zoonoses like SARS-CoV-2? Or would you rather be taken by surprise?

Going by the current state of affairs in the world, I have to say that being taken by surprise seems to have very little to recommend it.

With great care, in isolation and with full transparency. Tthere are protocols for how to deal with lab accidents or outbreaks and prior incidents show that all of these have lower priority than 'saving face' for the Chinese government.

I feel like it is completely speculative as you said and I am not conspiratorial at all. Because China is so secretive and has already been known to punish people for reporting on this it seems likely that these theories will only increase (I mean, how could you ever prove them wrong given China's actions)

The US is far more open than China, yet the amount of batshit crazy conspiracy theories that circulate about it is staggering. Only an incredibly slim minority of them actually turn out to be true... Or something resembling true.

I don't think the openness of a country has much to do with the number of conspiracy theories that form about it.

Conspiracy theories find patterns in incomplete data. There is always incomplete data, and there are always patterns to find. IF you get deep enough into them, then you can even turn around and point at evidence that disproves your theory, with the claim that actually, it proves it!

Just the other day, I responded to a post on HN that claimed that there's a vast conspiracy by the Labour Bureau to hide unemployment numbers, by reporting only the U3 numbers, when the U6 numbers are more relevant.

When it was pointed out that the bureau reports the U6 numbers, as well as the U3, the claim turned into 'Well, its obviously a conspiracy - what better way to hide the truth than to conceal it in irrelevant gibberish!'

No amount of openness is ever going to dissuade that kind of intellectual dishonesty.

I’d add that in China, the government is especially aggressive at squashing down rumors/conspiracy-theories that involve itself. If the rumors are false, the evidence they provide is usually rock solid. When the evidence they provide is garbage (eg friend of said person swears that they are alive), then you can assume the rumors are true.

I'd say conspiracy theories thrive in communities where the people are used to being screwed over.

It is interesting that a potential accidental leak is now labeled as a "conspiracy theory" by the media outlets, even though China already had two accidentally leaks from their lab in Beijing. Including the SARS leak accident for which Chinese CDC officials were publicly punished in 2004. Same media outlets who keep repeating that masks are useless for civilians, publishing bat soup pictures from Palau Island as Wuhan food, and relaying unfiltered chinese propaganda and stats as "real news".

It’s a conspiracy theory if there isn’t any good evidence. The fact that labs have accidentally leaked pathogens before is not evidence that all future new pathogens are leaked from labs.

CMilk did a video a week or two ago on what evidence we have so far. I’d say it’s convincing enough; or rather, that within the context of China, there is enough smoke (disappearing lab members, papers removed...etc), lots of CCP efforts to call those rumors, and not much dispelling being done by the government. In all my years in China, if there’s one thing the government there hates, it’s rumors and they will do anything to squash them if they’re actually false (eg providing proof of life if people claim someone is missing vs just saying “I assure you they is alive.”)

Can we please cite something a little more substantive than random Youtube videos made by people with no apparent familiarity with the fields of endeavor they're trying to report on? I mean, I don't doubt the guy's good intentions, but this is like if I were trying to make a technical argument about the physics of string theory.

Well, one can easily dig into the sequences database, to find some useful clues:

-A lot of chinese papers have been published through the years on the topic, during multiples waves of sample collection over all the chinese mainland. Showing there was/is a notable interest about this pathogen issue.

-One can also easily spot which research center were/are the most active on the topic and its related research teams. Wuhan research center is not excluded from the list as some others main big labs.

-Each entry sequence in the database is dated with a location, publishing team and associated paper. It is useful for following the pathogen evolution building phylogeny trees.

-Aligning a lot of sequences clearly show that this strain is separated from the rest of the others mains strain. The only related sequences are the one released by the chinese team.

-The closest related sequences are 2013 year dated and other from 2015/2017/2019, which per se does not provide a lot of information about the real pathogen evolution.

-The different gain of function that this pathogen got compared to its predecessors is quite remarkable and hard to overlook.

-The overall AT/GC sequence content have also evolved from its predecessors showing rich AT content that is generally related to higher host habit and expression.

So yeah, knowing china is not smiley kind shaped, one can still question the research and lab habit as one would do for any other country. A theory based on excessive and unregulated animal sampling could have exacerbated the real cross-transmission issue is as valid as the one about pathogen leaking from the lab or simply by natural evolution.

Anyway one can clearly take a moment to question the overall package, along the safety lab practices deployed around the world when dealing with potential pathogens.

I'd be interested to look at that sequence comparison in more detail. IIRC you can link BLAST results etc. directly from NCBI's site, and I'm sure you can link the sequence accessions to which you refer.

Looking very carefully and with patience one can find everything on NCBI database. Otherwise there is a big repository of sequence here: http://www.mgc.ac.cn/DBatVir/

Yes, but the NCBI sequence database is quite vast. You seem already to have gone to the effort of finding and reviewing these sequences, and producing an analysis. Why not share your sources as well as your results, instead of asking others to find them from scratch and have to hope they're the same ones you're using?

But the fact that a government sometimes tries to cover up things does not mean that every claim is true. “They’ve covered stuff up before” just is not sufficient evidence for anything, including, say, Bigfoot.

We are not judging the validity of the claim from the claim alone. We are doing so from the pattern of behaviors around it by the CCP and how those patterns correlate to priors we’ve seen in the past when they’ve tried to hide the truth.

Lack of evidence isn’t sufficient to label a theory as conspiracy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory

Cool. Next time a cops investigate someone with priors or with similar MOs we should label them as conspiracy theorists.

I find it.. peculiar that giving merit to a theory about the Chinese government trying to cover up a lab accident is labeled or treated the same as other theories about Soros, Clintons, Illuminatis et al. There are data points which point to this. There is proof of doctors disappearing, active government censorship and prior accidents from China. Not to mention the statistical impossibility of their official epidemiological numbers. Why doesn't this merit at least the thought of an investigation? Or a non-zero probability? As someone who grew up in a communist state with a totalitarian government, I lived through 'manufactured realities' way more obscene than what I just described. This is peanuts.

It's interesting because whenever something like ^ appears online on reddit or (recently Blind), an army of people appear with one of the following arguments:

- I'm trying to deflect from the current US administration's incompetence. This IMO is an orthogonal problem

- the NY strains have European origins so why are you talking about China

- China was the only country to properly contain the virus

- tinfoil hat much?

No, rigorous investigation of possibilities indicated by priors is not conspiracy theory. It’s conspiracy theory when you claim that it’s true without any such investigation or evidence.

Researchers who warned us years ago about dangers of engineered bat virus leak scenario in an article from Nature Research Journal, should we label them as conspiracy theorists too?

No, that warning is either valid or invalid, based solely on the evidence and explanations provided in that warning.

It's not a conspiracy theory if there are significant priors, which this would be, assuming it's true. That's enough to justify taking the idea seriously on first pass, even if it turns out not to have been what happened in this case.

Here is a study of "Serological Evidence of Bat SARS-Related Coronavirus Infection in Humans, China" done in 2018 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/ The corresponding author Zheng-Li Shi is also the lead reasearcher of Wuhan lab.

I wish people use peer reviewed articles as supporting evidence when making arguments. These subjects (coronavirus origin and transmission) are well researched and disseminated.

Is that supposed to be evidence of the covid-19 outbreak originating from the Wuhan lab?

I wish people who use peer-reviewed articles as supporting evidence when making arguments would do a better job of understanding what those peer-reviewed articles are about.

Or, for that matter, of making an argument in the first place. You're not doing that here. You're just noting that a researcher who does research on transmission of coronaviruses from bats to humans, has published research on transmission of coronaviruses from bats to humans. I don't know what conclusion you expect anyone to draw from that.

People can draw their own conclusions. That is what is nice about solid evidence. I will make two notes:

1. Bats can transmit viruses to humans independent of wet markets and research activities and these villagers do travel to cities;

2. This particular research was funded jointly by USA, China and Singapore to monitor possible recurrence of SARS like virus.

Bats migrate. Migration brings species into contact with one another. (Even indirect contact such as sharing the same water source). With species in contact, viruses can spread. All this is perfectly normal.

What’s new here is that climate is changing, causing migration patterns to change, causing new interactions between species that previously did not interact. Some of which are eventually brought into contact with humans. Again none of this is new either, except for the climate change part. All of this could and did happen already without climate change, but climate change can turn things up a few notches by making migration pattern changes much more wide ranging than before.

So essentially what I am saying is it seems plausible that Covid-19 and its hit on the economy is one of the first “gifts” of global climate change. This seems to be right in front of our noses, but unnoticed by the whole world.

Climate change is one of those issues where you can draw a line between any problem and it. Maybe someone just ate an infected bat? Or got bit by a live infected bat? Seems way more probable.

But suggesting such a thing spoils the “opportunity” this crisis is brings. If people can connect climate change to everything then they can use that to advance their agendas regardless of actual causality. The Catholic Church did that for centuries. Other religious groups have done the same thing — even going back to the Greeks and Romans where pissed-off Gods led to plagues and famines. You angered Zeus? Well here is a volcano to teach you a lesson and here is some fancy words to convince people of the truth of it.

True, to your first part. Question is, how did the bat come to be where it was.

The flip side of being able to draw lines to climate change is that there’s a reason you can draw lines to it, namely the underlying reality that it touches just about everything, meaning it could in fact be playing a role.

Obviously it’s not conclusive though.

This may turn out to be one of the recurring themes of climate change linked problems: they are linkable in theory, but in practice it’s hard to be conclusive. With this theme continuing on for the next few centuries of human history as more problems emerge.

Climate change is not new, just three hundreds years ago there was little ice age.

Global travel is new.

As for source of the virus: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU

> none of this is new either, except for the climate change part

Are you saying climate changes haven’t led to changes in the past? That’s ridiculous. The fossil record is full of changes due to the climate changing.

Humans didn’t invent climate change. This arrogance that climate change hasn’t always happened is just nonsense. It’s like suggesting plate tectonics didn’t start until humans came around. Trying to make some implicit connection between bat Coronaviruses and too much CO2 is getting into religious territory.

There are some religious people that blame the Coronavirus pandemic on “God’s will” and now we are hearing climate change alarmists using similar language to explain literally everything bad that happens.

> Humans didn’t invent climate change.

But they are currently causing it.

> This arrogance that climate change hasn’t always happened is just nonsense.

That's a strawman. No one's saying that. It just happens that this time, we're mostly responsible. Not geological processes[1], or astronomical cycles[2], or the action of algae[3]. Btw, if algae can change the composition of the atmosphere, we certainly are capable.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles

2. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/origin-of-oxygen-...

A recent interview with the last author, Dr. Jonna Mazet, former director of the pandemic intelligence project disestablished by the current administration in September 2019: https://katz.substack.com/p/audio-edition-the-pandemic-preve...

Note that coronavirus is a big family of virus, only a few (2?) are transmisible from human to human and also potentially deadly for humans. Most of the virus in the coronavirus family don´t infect humans or are not harmful. You may get just a normal cold, and you are fine a week later.

They found 6 new versions of coronavirus, but IIUC they are not harmful for humans. This is business as usual.

FEIW, there are at least four common coronaviruses (229E, NL63, OC43, and HKU1) that humans transmit, and based on the CDC's language there are other less common ones.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/general-information.html

The larger point is that coronaviruses as a family are unusually good at mutation and recombination, especially in the facilitating environment of bats, which typically have a high viral load. That makes them of particular concern as a potential source of novel infectious diseases in humans.

Does bats have covid19 immunity serum?

The answer is even more fascinating then that: https://get21stnight.com/2020/03/30/why-do-we-keep-getting-d...

Interesting article thanks.

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