I'm disappointed to hear this news. Understanding the origins of Covid is one of the most important things we can do in this century.
If it was a lab leak there will be no accountability anyway.
If it wasn’t a lab leak, GoF research remains incredibly, incredibly high risk and should be banned.
Seems almost definitionally not meaningful.
Among the possibilities: wet markets, exploring caves, gain of function research, unclean cooking practices, or it could be just bad luck.
Each of those would lead us to drastically differing ways of trying to mitigate the next virus.
There doesn't seem to be a practical way to control all known bat caves or unsanitary cooking practices.
Controlling the illegal wildlife trade would require a huge government commitment which doesn't seem like a viable option.
Are they lying about this? Exaggerating it in some major way? If not, I see no reason they can't shut down big wet markets like the one in Wuhan.
I'm left to assume they know that COVID-19 did not originate in such a place. If it had, there would be an "all hands on deck" campaign by the security services to shut these markets down. It would be accompanied by a massive propaganda effort to convince average Chinese that wild and exotic meat is unsafe.
"Controlling the illegal wildlife trade would require a huge government commitment which doesn't seem like a viable option."
Why isn't it viable if it would prevent a pandemic? They already implement many other authoritarian policies (supposedly successfully) that are meant to curb far less dangerous outcomes.
You're making a lot of rational deductions from assumptions of rational behavior without taking into consideration the backpressure (or negative consequences) that rational behavior will cause.
eg If you start an exotic meat campaign, that's an implicit admission that it's a source (if not THE source) and you'll lose your position/head over suggesting it. Even if you could get some momentum, wherever you focus that campaign becomes the defacto ground zero. etc etc etc.
Isn't it the official position of Xi Jinping, and the broader CCP he controls, that it was from the Wuhan wet market?
I fail to understand why this is not a target for reform in China. "One bad apple", I guess.
Plausible, but not believable, from my perspective.
As it stands now, BSL3/BSL4 are totally arbitrary depending on what country you are in.
Except we did already know some stuff but a bunch of people ignored it anyway, including chunks of the government. We learned from past viruses and a certain admin just decided to ditch the literal playbook
Acknowledging an outbreak means an economic hit to the area where it is. Officials *never* react in time to actually stop it because by the time it's obvious there's a problem it's already spread.
How far it spreads comes down to how well it spreads and how well it resists efforts to stomp it out.
SARS had low infectivity and showed symptoms before it became contagious--isolating the infected was possible. The world jumped on it and managed to fence it into extinction. (Note, however, that whatever the precursor was it wasn't ever identified.)
MERS simply doesn't spread well regardless of containment.
Covid-19, however, spreads mostly before symptoms show. This makes containment very hard--China was able to stop it with draconian lockdowns but even that doesn't work against the Omicron variants, it's simply not possible to isolate people well enough. (There are documented cases of it spreading through walls--the only way to be sure it doesn't spread is with a negative pressure room. It probably can't spread through a truly solid wall but most walls are not.)
Source?
We now understand how COVID infections occur:
As a function of viral load due to exposure via inhalation of exhaled droplets transmitted through air shared with someone shedding the virus.
https://www.michigan.gov/coronavirus/frequently-asked-questi...
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/28/12/22-0666_article
I wouldn't worry too much about it though. I put it firmly in the possible but extremely unlikely category. I've seen other papers talking about the possibly of it spreading through apartment buildings though plumbing and air vents, and also spreading via shared spaces like hallways and elevators.
In the end, it's all a numbers game. If enough of the virus wafts your way and your immune system can't deal with it before it gets a foothold and spreads you'll get infected. If you've got a hole in the wall between you and your neighbor and your neighbor is sick and their virus is shedding like a stressed cat you might get sick too. We've also got plenty of cases where someone is living in the same household as someone infected and they don't get sick. It's really just down to the amount of exposure/viral load, and the immune system of the person exposed.
China is full of buildings with many, many residents and far from airtight. Many buildings over there also do not use p-traps. SARS has been documented to spread through the sewer stack this way, Omicron spreads *far* better than SARS.
That doesn't quite ring true to me - there's a difference between 'obvious to the public' and 'obvious to the experts'.
The problem is that if you respond to the experts, the problems don't eventuate, and the public goes "well what was all the fuss?".
We saw that with SARS. People were actually criticising the (then competent) WHO for their zealous response.
You get praised for fixing problems; you get shat on for preventing them.
that's... dramatic. It's an airborne virus that spread throughout a very badly constructed and poorly ventilated building that was literally filled with infected people.
The virus spreads easily, but it's far from impossible to keep it from spreading, as evidenced by the many people who have never caught it. There are a lot of variables that determines if someone gets sick after exposure. Someone can be in the same household with a person who has it and still never get sick. Containment is challenging, but not impossible, and it's probably not coming through the walls to get you.
Take sensible steps, and you've got a pretty good shot at avoiding getting infected as long as you aren't locked in a shitty hotel filled with holes and gaps in the walls where there are infected people all around you.
I hope we remember the utter failure of "Zero COVID", especially in places like China, for a very long time. Humility is a virtue.
I can't speak to china, but "Zero COVID" wasn't even attempted in the US, and I'm absolutely certain that if we'd tried harder we could prevented tens if not hundreds of thousands of deaths. Many Americans made no effort to avoid getting infected and some went out of their way to get infected or to promote the spread of the virus while others were convinced even as they gasped their last breaths that the virus was hoax or clung to treatments that were ineffective or harmful.
The efforts we Americans should have made but failed to started long before the first cases were discovered as people had been warning us about the dangers of a global pandemic yet we were entirely unprepared. Our stockpiles hadn't been maintained. Our hospitals were already understaffed and under-equipt. Our population already under-educated and lacking critical thinking skills. We were not ready for a crisis.
We could do better for the next pandemic (and it is coming) but I haven't seen a lot being done to prepare us and a lot of damage has already been done which will take a long time to repair. The CDC has proved themselves to be unworthy of our trust, the government has proved that it will not adequately care for the needs of its people in an emergency, and our supply chains have proven to be critically fragile. I don't give us very good odds at doing much better when the next virus enters the ring and starts taking shots. We were tested, we failed, and we're still failing.
Nor shall it ever be. Inshallah. :bow:
Yes, but when humans are infected it takes a while for the virus to adapt the mutations needed to efficiently spread human to human. This was the case for SARS/MERS/Bird Flu. But in the lab they can insert FCS that are extremely effective at entering human cells and spreading. So if any of these research studies leaks out of the lab there is no way to contain it. Besides we have been conducting this research for decades and it did not help fight or predict this pandemic and in fact these researchers refuse to even share records/data they have collected. So best case scenario, this research is useless, worst case disastrous!
In reality, securing something means taking steps to reduce the probability of the event, and reducing the impact of the event when it occurs.
What we should be doing is studying the viruses that appear to have the potential to be pandemics. We got lucky in this regard with Covid--we didn't actually engineer a vaccine in a year. Rather, we had been working on a SARS vaccine for many years, it had been taken as far as it could be without human trials (and since there were no cases of SARS around human trails were impossible.) The mRNA Covid vaccines are simply the old SARS vaccine with some tiny edits to the payload--what took the year was the human trials, not the creation of the vaccine. That took IIRC 2 days.
I dont disagree it should be banned either way but I think a bit naive to think it will be banned on its own.
So the argument should take the form of, “jeez, this was awful and even if this was natural or artificial, we are purposely producing stuff like this on a daily basis in labs that regularly make mistakes.”
If it wasn't a leak, we need to understand the geopolitical dynamics that led to this, if this is the case it was on par with Hiroshima and surface nuclear weapons testing, it is as dangerous a technology as nuclear weapons.
"If it wasn't a leak..." are you referring to a deliberate release scenario?
I was primarily referring to the accidental version because deliberate is way less believable than accidental.
There hopefully would be accountability from those in the west who did their best to crush any dissenting voices from even questioning the origins.
I take no stance on this and don't consider myself informed enough to have an opinion but I will say that even asking the question two years ago made people treat you like a moon landing denier.
I'd argue that response to crush the line of questioning at all is bad regardless of the true origin of the virus but if it did turn out to be a lab leak of some sort then hopefully it would spur all the academics, media pundits, and average joes who shouted down anyone asking questions to reevaluate their approach to topics like this.
Genuine question.
Covid is actually low in the lethality range for rampages from whatever is the underlying virus, it's just the others haven't spread so well. Finding that underlying virus could be useful, figuring out exactly how the zoonotic jump happened is simply an exercise in finger-pointing that will do nothing about the fact that they do happen naturally.
All this “prevent it from recurring” is cute but wont last long if history can tell.
Like it or not, if it’s Chinas fault then they should be forced to pay reparations. At the very least held accountable and change the circumstances that led to them breeding the virus.
2) If they would, then this would be a very good reason not to investigate further
I am not a religious person in general, but I do sometimes wonder if society as a whole isn't losing something valuable in the declining beliefs in a cosmic balancing even if a secular balancing can't occur. Whether that's karma or judgement day, there's a lot of anger floating about these days about wrongs that are just realistically too costly to address, that in other belief systems would at least be assuaged by the belief that they would be addressed in the after life.