You might be interested in reading this (very long, amateur, pseudononymous, non-peer-reviewed) analysis theorizing "SARS-CoV-2 presence in China as far back as March 2018." [0]
[0] https://theethicalskeptic.com/2021/11/15/chinas-ccp-conceale...
[0] https://theethicalskeptic.com/2021/11/15/chinas-ccp-conceale...
I, and nearly every colleague in the downtown San Francisco office I worked at, contracted Covid in early January 2020. There should be no doubt that there was already widespread community transmission in California in late 2019. Yet, strangely, "hospital capacity" did not become a concern until right after the U.S. declared a nationwide state of emergency in March.
Why was it not a problem in the nearly 4 months prior? I believe many people were convinced that the virus was far more dangerous than it was, and voluntarily began seeking hospitalization when none was actually needed.
Or do you rely solely on appeals to authority when filtering signal from noise? I’ve noticed throughout this pandemic that many arguments supported on such a weak basis have later been disproven or severely undercut by further evidence.
Some examples: the virus likely leaked from a lab (at some time); masks reduce transmission; the virus is airborne; there is no sterilizing vaccine; vaccinated people can catch and transmit Covid; vaccines have waning efficacy; “fully vaccinated” will eventually turn to “recently vaccinated;” the mRNA vaccines can lead to myocarditis to such a degree that their risk may not outweigh their benefit for some age groups; a variant will eventually emerge with a high degree of immune escape…
There are many examples of conspiracy theories becoming mainstream narrative months later. So while many of them remain conspiracy theories, and the information environment continues to be overwhelmingly noisy, it seems imprudent to discount a source based on appeal to an authority that has been so consistently wrong, sometimes even willfully so (like when CDC lied that “masks don’t work” in order to save them for healthcare workers).
It's a workday and I'm busy but I'll grant you one substantive critique; the OP heavily relies on "mutations per year" as a metric to derive how plausible it is that something like Omicron could have mutated in the timeframe necessary.
Does it strike you as a bit suspect to rely on a mutations/time period, and completely ignore the number of infections? It should. The rate of mutations/year is a useful metric for determining the average mutation rate between two different viruses given certainty of their dates -- it's not at all useful for "aging" a specific variant because the calculation is independent of the number of infections.
We're in the midst of a pandemic with hundreds of millions of infections, so the selection pressure for more "fit" viruses is immense. OP tries to get around this by claiming that the rate of mutation that we've actually measured (which is an order of magnitude higher than his assumption!) is suspect and would "extinguish SARS COV2 within a season" but that's just gibberish.
I don’t like words like “believe” that imply a reliance on faith. I seek truth through evidence and my goal is to filter signal from noise.
> Does it strike you as a bit suspect to rely on a mutations/time period, and completely ignore the number of infections?
I’m far from a virologist, but I think OP’s postulation around mutation frequency is a bit more subtle than simply N / time.
See Exhibit [7.7] for example, which makes it visually clear just how distinct omicron is from any other variant. I’m not qualified to speculate beyond this, but it seems OP is saying a bit more than “there are a lot of mutations” – indeed, he spends multiple sections disambiguating the evidence of pure volume of mutations from that of phylogenetic distance. Still, you may have a point — maybe it only takes one mutation into a new dominant “clade” to produce such distinction, with any subsequent mutation being of little surprise given the prevalence established by the first one.
> It's a workday and I'm busy
On this we can agree.
[7.7] https://i0.wp.com/theethicalskeptic.com/wp-content/uploads/2...