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Comment by eps | Hacker News Reader

I am in Europe and it's the first time ever I hear about bulls spreading Covid to humans.

I was referring to the Pangolin, which I had never heard of until 10 months ago. Mascot was probably the wrong word, but I don’t know what else to call the naming trend of “use an animal name that starts with the letter we want”.

Penguin? Most people will run Linux on it anyway

Oh believe me, you won’t be confusing a pangolin for a penguin anytime soon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangolin

That's not very precise of you.

First time I hear about a pangolin-Covid connection too. As far as the animal angle of the Covid goes the only thing that I can think of, with effort, is the mink, because of Dutch culling them in bulk in recent weeks. Nothing else.

Edit - looked it up. Ah, so that's about the Chinese market trading exotic wild animals that was the ground zero of the outbreak. Never remembered that it had pangolins in the mix and I doubt that very many people do.

I thought it was a bat? Never heard of a pangolin wrt to covid either.

pangolin unheard of until pandemic for sure but made it into household enough to be a starring feature in the South Park pandemic episode I noticed

Yes but if you buy one of these, install Ubuntu 12.04, and set your wallpaper to some of these lovely creatures then you can look at pangolins on Pangolin on your Pangolin. And isn't that what life's really all about in the end?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVt5EZNAqLU

South Park did it. Probably NSFW

The parent was talking about pangolins, although ironically there's data to show that bovines can also contract and transmit COVID-19. What a time to be alive! (or at the very least not yet dead in a pandemic!)

Pangolin

The pangolin as an intermediate host between bats and humans is a valid virologist theory, but as far as I am aware there is no physical evidence for these zoonotic jumps, is there?

As far as I've been able to tell, the evidence for pangolins as the vector for Covid is somewhat circumstantial at the moment, based largely on their presence in the Wuhan wet market that has been implicated in early spread, a history of pangolins being found to carry and transmit various coronaviruses similar to Covid-19, and some specifically suspicious test results in pangolins from the market. Nothing specifically causative that I've seen (AFAIK, the link to the wet market as the source rather than an early transmission location isn't even well-established).

I suspect that, given we're a year on from the initial transmission of the virus in humans, unless the Chinese government has more research they haven't made public, we'll likely never know the truth.

> AFAIK, the link to the wet market as the source rather than an early transmission location isn't even well-established

My understanding is that there's really no evidence for it being the source at all; it's effectively a myth. It was an early super spreader, but there's no particular reason to think it was the _source_.

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