Unexpected detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the prepandemic period in Italy | Hacker News Reader

Unexpected detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the prepandemic period in Italy

journals.sagepub.com

27 pointswatermelon5917 comments

China has consistently exhibited shady behavior when dealing with this virus. The Nature paper showing that the virus came from pangolin has been found to be fabricated.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2313-x https://mobile.twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/132034405523096371...

Anyone who still believes this came from a wet market is a conspiracy theorist.

This was an accidental release of natural (but artificially-selected) virus from a lab studying SARS and related coronaviruses.

Some of us have been saying this for 10 months now.

I think (so this is a personal theory) what we are seeing is that a version was circulating earlier that was highly contagious. It got to Wuhan and maybe through an accidental cross-infection, potentially an individual working at the lab, inherited some RNA to mutate into something far more deadly.

What no one is saying is how the earlier version differed, but was obviously not killing that many people or we would have heard about it. Anecdotally there was just a spike in hospital pneumonia cases.

Nice source you have there.

Missed the deconstruction of the infamous set of articles/preprints, thanks. Not being a virologist, one could only superficially browse GISAID/NCBI data at the time, but RaTG13 appearance a la deus ex machina was almost immediately fishy.

As a non-virologist, it's nearly impossible to determine who is wearing the tin foil hats. I've read five or six different but equally outlandish origin theories and convoluted Beautiful Mind / Minority Report threads about Covid in the last 30 minutes and everyone seems to be circlejerking about their own wild theories.

How can I, someone entirely outside the domain, begin to filter what is credible and what is nonsense?

If the virus is real, then how come trump supporters are rallying, and liberals rioting?

This idea, if for fun, extended into all industries is an interesting thought experiment.

- without being a mechanic and understanding the intricacies of an engine, safety standards, how parts wear, how can I possibly purchase the correct car?

- without being a nutritionist, how can I possibly ensure I’m getting all the micronutrients I need, macros I need, with all the choices at a grocery store?

The outcome I see from this is industry specific governing bodies are necessary since the world is so complicated, or.. we need a service for micro-consulting where I can talk to an expert for 15 minutes. Like a doctors appointment but not insanely expensive and not comically inefficient. I would imagine a good amount of people would be cars that were $1,000 cheaper if it didn’t include a seatbelt.

> we need a service for micro-consulting where I can talk to an expert for 15 minutes

This is the problem. There are experts in the field with PhDs and other decorations to their name that contradict each other pretty starkly.

When it comes to mass hysteria, it's imperative to seek out a known source of truth. I cannot find one, however.

If the findings in this paper are true (which, for the moment, I think we need to doubt), then this is an incredible bombshell of a finding. It suggests, at least to my reading, that this virus was spreading in communities for several months before being noticed. The fact that the IgM was found to be so much lower than IgG suggests an additional month or more before the September 2019 sample. It also suggests that the virus may not have originated in China.

Both of these are at least vaguely plausible - if it was the in the early phases of exponential growth, and, unlikely as this is, didn't make its way into high-risk groups during that time, then obviously it just had the appearance of a typical seasonal coronavirus. If people over 65 didn't exist, we'd probably have never even identified this virus.

The sample wasn't random - it "was enrolled from September 2019 to March 2020 through the SMILE trial (Screening and Multiple Intervention on Lung Epidemics; ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT03654105), a prospec-tive lung cancer screening study using low-dose computed tomography and blood biomarkers, with the approval of our institutional review board and ethics committee."

I don't know what effect that might have in skewing the results; I look forward to expert analysis on this point.

On the second piece - the matter of origin - the evidence of Chinese origin is strong, but not airtight by any means. It's not altogether impossible for it to have emerged in Europe and been unnoticed.

Still, I have to believe that something is very wrong with this study, and that its findings are an error, until we these results reproduced or further analyzed. As much as I'd love for it to be true.

The thing that I can't reconcile is that seroprevalence this high wasn't found in any surveys until much, much later - I believe late April 2020. And there is no place that achieved seroprevalence without high-risk groups being affected (and substantial deaths as a result). It seems likely that any situation in which these numbers are real has to at least have appeared as a very, very bad flu season, and that wasn't the case in late 2019 in Europe.

So what the heck is happening here?

And why isn't this huge, bombshell news around the world? Far less meaningful studies have received much more bombastic coverage.

I have trouble parsing these sentences correctly. Are they saying 14% of the samples from September 2019 tested positive for antibodies?

Yes. It is very surprising. I can't see the paper through the paywall, only the abstract, though. Specificity of their test may be low. There are other, older coronaviruses in circulation.

The paper is available on Sci-hub, but the paper itself is pretty light, referring primarily to the supplemental material[1] for details about the tests. I can't judge about the tests, but their control was "Negative human serum(IgA/IgM/IgG)" according to the supplemental materials, and if I understand correctly this is simply a basic serum that would always test negative and so I think this adds some credence to the idea that it might not be specific enough. Maybe it wasn't possible to get a control with an older coronavirus?

In any case, I agree that it's surprising, because knowing what we do about the virus now, if it was in the population back in September and assuming that the numbers in the general population were a lot higher than 23 in September, I think something would have been noticed earlier, although I guess it's somewhat plausible that it could have been masked by the normal autumn/winter flu hospitalizations. I also think it would have been caught in the research that the Italian NIH did earlier this year when they looked at wastewater[2] and found that it was there in mid-December 2019 but tested from October. Given these, plus this paper being both light on details and being published in what I can tell as a small journal makes me skeptical.

1: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/0300891620974... 2: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-...

Putting aside a potential common benefit coming from doing so, I'm having trouble morally justifying testing someone's blood for other purposes than it was explicitly given for.

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