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Comment by ZoomerCretin | Hacker News Reader

The reason it never caused a global pandemic had nothing to do with how transmissible it was, and everything to do with early detection and limited Draconian measures to contain it.

SARS-CoV-2 was not only not engineered to bind to human receptors, it was not engineered at all and there is no credible person or source that makes this claim.

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It was more transmissible and critically people were infectious for 2-3 days before experiencing symptoms, whereas that period was less than a day with SARS-Cov-1, that was a critical difference.

The period of 1 day of transmissibility before symptoms is the exact same with influenza virus. Influenza, very famously, was not transmissible enough to cause a pandemic at all, ever, and totally does not continuously circulate throughout the entire world to this day.

Oh wait.

> there is no credible person or source that makes this claim.

The issue here is that for many people taking your position, making the claim makes you not credible. By definition, there can be no credible source making that claim, because to make that claim revokes your credibility.

It doesn't sound like you really know what you are talking about, but are just here to try to flame war. Plenty of credible people in biomedical fields believe it is possible the virus was engineered and have published about why...it isnt really worth responding to that claim, you can just look it up. As for the other claim, yes the binding affinity to ACE2 is lower in original SARS and this probably limited it as well as other attributes of that virus:

"Although the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV S proteins are similar, the binding affinity of the SARS-CoV-2 S protein to the ACE2 receptor is much higher as compared to SARS-CoV, which may account for its increased transmissibility."

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