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Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how a virus that evolved to jump species in the last five years could already have this massive swiss army knife of different ways to fuck us up. It's like every couple of months we discover some wild new thing it does. They could come out tomorrow and say it makes you go color-blind and I wouldn't even be surprised at this point.

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Indeed.

The reason is that comes from bats. Bat immunology is wild. As I understand it, coming from bats to humans, a virus is basically coming from thousands of years in the future – of an evolutionary arms race.

Bats have evolved much more complexity in parts of their immune systems than us, and viruses along with them. They have extremely rapid metabolism and live packed together in ideal condition for viral transmission. Flight metabolism in bats is absolutely bonkers. Intense energy generation and the requisite damage control. Of DNA. And other stuff.

Bats handle viral infections quite differently than we do and can for example tolerate chronic infections with viruses that can and would kill humans. The arms race is so advanced that for them it’s no longer a question of exterminaton but successful containment. As species and individuals of that species, we do not handle chronic infection well. Note that bats have evolved these mechanisms through selection by survival, naturally accompanied with non-selection through death.

It was known and we were warned that bat viruses would mess us up. It was a known hazard and we were warned to watch for it and not let this happen due do these reasons.

Bat virome on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_virome

Novel Insights Into Immune Systems of Bats, 2020: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2020.0002...

Decoding bat immunity: the need for a coordinated research approach, 2021: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-021-00523-0

Revising the paradigm: Are bats really pathogen reservoirs or do they possess an efficient immune system?, 2022: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9379578/

Bats are “blind” to the deadly effects of viruses, editorial / paper highlight, 2018: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciimmunol.aau2259

Of bats and men: Immunomodulatory treatment options for COVID-19 guided by the immunopathology of SARS-CoV-2 infection, 2021: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciimmunol.abd0205

Long-Read Sequencing Reveals Rapid Evolution of Immunity- and Cancer-Related Genes in Bats, 2023: https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evad148

Antiviral Immune Responses of Bats: A Review, 2012: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1863-2378.2012.01528.x

Comparative Analysis of Bat Genomes Provides Insight into the Evolution of Flight and Immunity, 2012: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1230835

Immunological Control of Viral Infections in Bats and the Emergence of Viruses Highly Pathogenic to Humans, 2017: https://doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2017.01098

I wonder if this is the reason for the traditional association of bats with evil. Bats aren't directly dangerous to humans, they don't look scary like sharks, and they don't eat our foods, so it seems strange that they had such a bad image before conservationists started rehabilitating it. Maybe this was a mistake and we should have encouraged people to fear them.

I feel my hardware instincts don't react too strongly to bats. Nothing like the visceral reaction I get from snakes or spiders.

It's a lab leak though isn't it?

It doesn’t actually matter. The things SARS-CoV-2 can do already existed inside the world of bat viruses and bat immunology. What happened is that it found an “adapter” to fit to human cells. It could have been a lab leak, it could have been pure chance in a biologically risk-pressurized environment, and it doesn’t matter.

It messes us up. It is a threat to the health and wellbeing of people. It’s surprisingly easy to stop transmission, and surprisingly difficult to work with after infection. There’s a lot of clear scientific knowledge on actions we can take. The academic papers on this mostly lay unread. There is a waiting time from clear scientific results in molecular biology to medical and engineering applications, and this waiting time is far, far too long. Not as in “move fast and break things”, but rather “doctors should read”.

Why doesn't it matter that it's a lab leak?

Because labs can't build a virus from the ground up. They'd be working from an existing virus and only making the smallest of adjustments.

Is anyone even suggesting a genetically modified virus?

Yes, mostly fucking idiots.

Ok, I'm not excluding the possibility of a lab leak, but I would expect it to be just badly handled regular microbiological/pathological research rather than genetic engineering.

Back when it was hard to prove that it was a lab leak, the theory was censored and we were called crazy. Now that it is obvious that it was a lab leak, we are told it doesn't really matter.

It's still contested isn't it?

It’s there out in the wild, knowing it escaped from a lab is literally irrelevant to treatment

Knowing how it started might help develop treatments, and that seems like a really weird thing to ignore.

If it was a lableak, then there's documents and data that would have been extremely helpful, and which still matter.

There's also the other benefits of knowing: public health preparedness, scientific research policies, global biosecurity, international relations and trust, legal and ethical accountability, zoonotic spillover research, public clarity, etc.

It completely baffles me that people are still dismissing the lableak theory as unimportant.

What kind of insurance did that lab have and in which country should I sue if it's a leak ?

> It’s surprisingly easy to stop transmission

I am afraid this is not true. It is not easy to stop transmission. I dont have on my phone links to studies but I remember that all mechanism we have except quarantine are working within a probability range.

With all measures that we took for this virus it is now probably in all communities around the glob.

I understand. I swear, however: It is surprisingly easy, it is literally surprising to learn how easy it is to stop transmission.

It’s essentially this:

People breathe it out. Don’t breathe it in. We have filtration materials that strip it out of the air.

It has been easy to avoid infection. I have found it easy. Mechanically speaking.

Socially, it has been difficult. Because of severe failures of judgement made by people in positions of responsibility in public health organizations. Because of obviously incorrect guidance.

I am aware that this is an extraordinarily tall claim. I ask to be forgiven, ask for your consideration, promise that I am in good faith and under a moral obligation to point to this. Here’s one reference for it out of many available:

What Were the Historical Reasons for the Resistance to Recognizing Airborne Transmission during the COVID-19 Pandemic?, submitted 2021, published 2022 – https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3904176

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edit: There are also recent studies which show that immunization does confer blocking protection, if the inhaled dose is lowered. Apologies; Am out of time, there’s a child to attend to.

> could already have this massive swiss army knife of different ways to fuck us up.

It's exactly _because_ it just jumped, that it fucks us up. Given time, milder strains develop which are more adjusted to humans and adapt in the right places to cause less havoc.

Ubfortunately this is not true. Viruses evolve to survive and reproduce more, like anything subject to evolution. That can create less virulent strains and it can equally create more virulent strains.

A virus has no reason to adjust to our body in ways that cause less harm to us, unless doing so increases its chance of reproduction.

It's complex, agreed, but in general, increasing the chance of survival of the host correlates with better reproductive capabilities of the virus. This works both ways. After a particularly virulent strain has hit a population, those humans that survive are more likely to be adjusted to the strain, so it causes less problems for them.

It's had a very long time to evolve a toolkit of methods optimal to the bodies of mammals.

We share a lot of cellular similarities with other mammals and these techniques are very much a kind of base level lowest common denominator cellular hacking.

Biology has the tendency to repurpose existing mechanisms for other things. If an illness affects one of these processes, it might affect others as well.

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