Chances of finding Covid-virus ancestor ‘almost nil’, say virologists | Hacker News Reader

Chances of finding Covid-virus ancestor ‘almost nil’, say virologists

nature.com

26 pointsbaja_blast9 comments

What I find interesting is for both SARS1 and MERS they were able to find an intermediate animal responsible for the spillover within months. Another key difference with SARS2 and SARS1/MERS is that when spillovers from an intermediate animal such as ferrets/camels happen it always spills over in many locations over time since the virus is circulating within the intermediate animal population. So you'll find unrelated outbreaks in different geographic locations each with slightly different mutations present.

But with SARS2 there seems to only have been on single outbreak, and we have not been able to find the intermediate species where the spillover occurred. On top of that both SARS1/MERS the outbreaks displayed traceable mutations that occurred as it adapted to humans, initially being poorly suited for humans. SARS2 on the other hand was perfectly adapted for humans.

Sure does make a compelling argument to consider a lab leak as the source.

it does, but investigating the lab origin could have negative implications of a large swath of Virology. So it's better for virologists to ignore the issue all together.

Great, so the whole civilization is now at greater risk of something worse than COVID escaping a lab because of… the same group of people that let it escape from a lab.

Edit: haha downvoted immediately. Not suspicious at all.

Please cite ability to find sars and mers animals "within months." Iirc it was years

For SARS1 they detected the virus from in Himalayan palm civets at a market in Guangdong. "All the animal isolates retain a 29-nucleotide sequence that is not found in most human isolates." - which means the virus was not from human to civet as opposed to human -> civet

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1087139

For MERS(outbreak 2012) they linked the intermediate species to be camels https://www.science.org/content/article/new-middle-eastern-v...

One thing you'll notice when reading the studies of these two viruses they both had multiple spill overs since the virus was circulating in an intermediate species.

When you hear "It took years to find the source", what they are talking about is the original bat source that the virus originated before it infected the intermediate hosts. These statements are disinformation since when people are talking about "finding the intermediate host" they are speaking of the animal the that triggered the spillover to humans which is much easier to trace and can be found quite quickly.

I appreciate the distinction you made for me between intermediate host and original source. Appreciate realizing I misunderstood you :D

In any case it doesn't seem like I fully understand the significance of your intermediate host bit. I wrote a bit more, but cut it out. Frankly I don't know enough about the field to understand the significance or not of a lack of known intermediate host for an emergent virus

Certain virologists and journalists are deliberately blurring the distinction between intermediate host and original reservoir. It's not hard to imagine why.

Help me understand the relative probabilities then. What are the probabilities of other novel virii in SARS and adjacent families?

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