Covid 5 years later: Learning from a pandemic many are forgetting
science.org
science.org
you know those movies where all humans band together in the face of adversity? i now know the reality is that it will be full of nonstop misinformation and political infighting along the way. i suppose i understood it on an intellectual level but seeing it play out is something different. we are more idiocracy than contagion.
Something I find of interest is the set of all conjectures whose Bayesian probability estimates would be significantly revised in light of this discrepancy.
On 24 March, Western Australia closed its borders to the rest of Australia, and on 1 April, the state implemented borders between regions in the state.
By mid-April 2020, the state had eliminated community transmission of COVID-19, becoming one of the few places in the world to do so.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Western_A...
and: https://www.wa.gov.au/organisation/department-of-the-premier...
Just delaying it to 2022 according to those same articles, as it had already exited the evolutionary fit population’s memory everywhere else in the world
I suggest you read the articles, from the linked Wikipedia source:
Why are there so many Covid cases in Australia?
Prof Catherine Bennett, the chair in epidemiology at Deakin University, said Australia’s high reported infection rate may be the result of high “case ascertainment”.
Although PCR testing rates have dropped off in Australia, “we’re probably still doing it more so than anywhere else in the world”, Bennett said. “We still have free PCR testing. A lot of countries don’t.”
The number of confirmed Covid cases shouldn’t be relied on in isolation, Bennett said. “If you compare us to, say, the UK, they look much better for infection rates,” she said. “The UK’s confirmed case rate is 128 cases per million – less than a tenth of Australia’s 1,515 figure.
“Yet their hospitalisation rate per million is 209, and ours is 124. It suggests that they probably have twice as many [true] cases [as Australia].”
In short, we paid attention to case numbers, when we had zero cases we had zero cases and when we had 1,500 mild infections post vaccnation we had 1,500 mild infections.
Other places seemed to run on guesswork and magical thinking.
China’s surprise loosening was a disaster, as their vaccines were not the same and didnt have comparable efficacy.
In 2022, I'm sure pretty much any region would be much better prepared to get hit by COVID-19 for the "first" time.
my main observation is that it was too long for most of the population and your standard has no limit.
most places did not improve their hospital capacity and infrastructure. some conjecture about the virus was answered but thats it.
We did, and the inevitable was 99% double vaccination, very few serious (hospitalisation) cases, very few deaths, at the cost of business as usual within the state and goods being quarentine 'airlocked' in and out across the border.
I wrote a longer reply but for some rare unknown reason HN ate my homework :( .. and it's late in the day here ATM.
We have an aging population that has representatives like them, they optimized for themselves and it was not necessary for the rest of us. Beforesight, in hindsight, and we are still not represented in the mental health repercussions that should be weighed, especially amongst the maladjusted adolescent and now young adult population that makes more sense to have been optimized for in a functioning society.
And what did we do with slowing down how many elderly people died? We did not expand hospital capacity in but did buy time in a coincidence that has almost no standard of review. For example, In the US if only 100,000 people died instead of 1 million (or the 10 million some were afraid of), it still would be a political disaster for whoever was in office, the same at 10,000, or even the 3,000 matching 9/11. Its good that the hospital system didnt get overwhelmed, or for long in some municipalities, by mostly coincidence.
Response could have been tailored to factor in reality quicker, which is what ultimately happened anyway: A bifurcated system where those fit interacted with the world, and those not did not. Many of them are still functionally quarantined to this day. Could have been the same by 2021, everywhere.
The fear of whole working populations becoming crippled and unable to work due to „long covid“ (mostly just good old PVFS/SEID/CFS) was quickly disproven.
Policies never reflected that, disproportionately harming the young mentally, physically and economically.
The damaged trust in governments and public health organisations was immense and on an irreparable level. Rightfully so, as for example in Austria, the stationary clerk store had to check my vaccination certificate before selling me a pen.
There’s no magic solution to pandemics, only a choice between bad options. “Fuck it, let all the old people die off” never struck me as a reasonable option.
*Died with COVID
We didn't know that in the first place though. We expected it, but I shared the sentiment of better be safe then sorry. At least for 2020. I think after that it got handled extremly badly. I can only speak of germany from personal experience though. While I still can understand _some_ of the decissions made by politics, I think they were communicated very very bad and not discussed openly
In this context, "novel" is medical/scientific jargon that doesn't mean what the average person thinks it means. It should never have made it to the public, because it created a misunderstanding about what was going on. It simply meant "humans haven't encountered this virus before so no one has immunity". Instead the common understanding became "this virus is so different we can't rely on any previous knowledge and have to start from scratch".
There was an absolute willingness to allow views in support of a fear narrative win through. (No matter their grounding.) The probing/questioning threads were quickly closed down.
Some of it was done by the social media companies acting at the direction of the state. But much of it was actioned by military information security units acting against the general population.
It's weird to me how quickly folks forgot the depth of our ignorance during the beginning of covid. Do you remember when we all started washing our groceries when we got home because we weren't even sure if covid survived on surfaces? Remember when we were desperate to slow the curve because medical staff were overwhelmed and people were dying from lack of services?
Sure, in hindsight we really screwed kids up with lockdowns. We probably kept it all going too far for too long. There was probably politics on both sides and lack of purely rational decisions on both sides.
Then in February we got strong data that had a low fatality rate and mostly only threatened old people, similar to the flu, for example from the Diamond Princess cruise ship that provided a clear view since it was a closed environment with a lot of older people where everyone could be tested. Only after this did the lockdowns start and then continue for years.
So i think the response was catastrophic. There was no response at the time when it was an unknown disease and it could have been an existential threat for all we knew. Then there was an irrational over-response that lasted very long when we had strong data that indicated it wasnt that much worse than the flu. So now people wont even take it seriously or trust any messaging next time there is a potential pandemic. It is difficult to imagine a worse response or outcome.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_Diamond_P...
That's where I've landed looking back on it. The first month or so of staying home, being overly cautious, and "flattening the curve" made sense given the unknowns. But limiting outdoor gatherings in some contexts but not others (no-go on outdoor parties, but George Floyd protests are fine), keeping kids in Zoom school through 2021, and continued neuroticism even after vaccines were widely available---all that left a sour taste in my mouth.
But I'm also hearing from people who are convinced of a vast conspiracy and believe we knew day one that the lockdowns were a bad idea(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration). But we didn't know. It's tempting to cherry-pick the well reasoned opinions of a minority of experts especially when it backs up your worldview but I'm not having it.
Imo, your question is a question with 10,000 answers. But also imo the biggest issue with most places responses was that it asked people to behave collectively in a society that rewards only individual action. Asking people to stay home when they’re sick for the good of their neighbours only works if people are supported when they stay home, or they have the means and desire to do it out of the goodness of their heart
I myself tend to lean towards the first group, but also recognize that masks during covid might have been a good thing. At least in the beginning when we didn't know what we can expect.
So does anyone have any literature on how good masks are, if we should be wearing them and if so, when we should?
This is unequivocally false. There is zero benefit to exposure to almost all viruses that infect humans. At best you would get sick and then have limited immunity to that single strain for a period of time, but getting sick is always worse than not getting it. You're not going to get immunity to the flu by "exercising" your immune system with colds or vice versa.
The only exception I'm aware of is chicken pox, where getting it young had better outcomes than getting it in adulthood so it made sense to seek exposure, but we have a vaccine for that now which is significantly better than ever getting it.
That doesn't necessarily mean we should all go around wearing masks always. There are certainly tradeoffs associated with that.
Indeed, please consider a chickenpox vaccination over inducing exposure if it is a choice between the two; there is a significantly lower risk of shingles.
That's a very good point. As I understood it, even if we ignore the people that don't cover their nose, you have to be very careful when putting one on, to get the desired protection. Most people just don't care enough about it. Also use them to often, yada yada yada...
Good advice and easy to do. Just use your favorite source to find review articles. You don't need to read many, as conclusions were quite uniform.
It was only after 2020 that any studies were done on effectiveness in use. The results are a lot more positive there. However, it was still difficult to do controlled studies so the results aren't as strong as one would like.
1. Epidemiological: "Town A mandated masks and town B didn't. Was there any difference in reported rate of pathogen spread?" Reviews over the past century of epidemic responses indicated no overall benefit.
2. Clinical: "In a controlled situation, was there a difference in rate of pathogen spread between the mask-user group and the non-mask group?" There was soft support for some benefit in non-sterile, close-contact environments.
3. Laboratory: "On a laboratory bench, what degree of pathogen capture was achieved by the mask apparatus?" These studies assume that performance on the bench correlates to performance in the field. The N95 mask is a case in point. On the bench, it performs better, but reviews of clinical studies didn't find a strong effect in field use.
That's how we got the pandemic.
I’ve seen groups in Asia wearing masks as a gesture of respect for their community. It’s not to say we’ll all fall hopelessly naive to disease if we don’t wear masks, but we would all certainly be happier not getting a debilitating virus at least every year.
FWIW, a lot of the research money has dried up, so I’d be surprised if any longitudinal studies will arise now about disease prevention and masking. Seems like a study tricky to control.
100% agreed.
We wore masks pretty religiously (definitely when it was mandated, often when it wasn’t for a while).
Several months ago, our household got COVID, one persons at a time. We always quarantined in a room, and wore a mask for the limited time we left quarantine.
A couple months ago, my mom tested positive, while living with three others. No one ever wore a mask or quarantined, only keeping a distance. Nobody else ended up with it.
Very anecdotal and not scientific at all, but it’s these and other similar anecdotes that make it very hard to understand the impact masks have on spreading/not spreading the virus.
The types of masks most people use and the way they wear them maybe filter 70-80%. That’s about 0.5 on a log 10 scale. That will make a difference sometimes, but not that often if the experienced variation in concentration is maybe 4-5 orders of magnitude for a positive person.
If you’ve got someone sick in your house and you don’t want to get covid, you need to do high quality masks on everyone, fans blowing out windows, air filters, intelligent HVAC operation, etc. If you do all of that you can probably get 3 orders of magnitude reduction and likely keep it from getting everyone in the house.
E.g. from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8499874/
Results: When the adherence to mask usage guidelines is taken into account, the empirical evidence indicates that masks prevent disease transmission: all studies we analysed that did not find surgical masks to be effective were under-powered to such an extent that even if masks were 100% effective, the studies in question would still have been unlikely to find a statistically significant effect.
However, if you study efficiency of masking mandates, you do not get the luxury of controlling masking protocols and *have* to take adherence to masking protocols as population parameter. As expected, studies where actual adherence is in the gutter find masking mandates ineffective at population level.
I'm still wearing a mask when I have a cold though, especially in public transportation.
The answer is to do sufficiently powered RCTs to resolve the question, not conclude that masking works on the basis of low quality observational studies.
Which pretty much in my observation no one back then was wearing masks correctly, was wearing the correct masks that actually had some effect (when worn correctly), or were changing them at a appropriate frequency according to guidelines.
But when worn and used correctly they are extremely effective, the physics and engineering on which they are based has never been in doubt.
They initially said masks wouldn't help so that the public wouldn't buy them up.
This is covered in the documentary "Totally under control".
I work in medical, and I've been wearing an N95 at work and in public indoors spaces (especially supermarkets) consistently.
No cold / flu / SARS-CoV-2 in over 2.5 years. Actually no noticable communicable illnesses at all. I don't miss that congested nose. I don't miss the shivering cold on a hot day. I don't miss the hacking cough. I don't miss the horrible syrups and weird lightheadedness after taking some of the cold-flu meds.
Masking up is rock'n'roll.
The positive studies that everyone is referencing are all observational studies subject to confounders. For instance, the people that comply with mask mandates probably do other things that slow the spread of the virus, like washing their hands. It's impossible to control for all confounders without a priori randomization. That is why RCTs were invented, why they are the "gold standard" of evidence, and why they are the only type of study included in the systematic reviews done by Cochrane.
When the RCTs are systematically reviewed the effect of masks disappears. This is the infamous "Cochrane study" you'll read about. This review is conducted periodically, it has been done six or seven times in the last 20 years, and has failed to find evidence of masks/respirators slowing the spread of any respiratory viruses. However, this same review shows that hand washing slows the spread of the COVID virus. [0]
Maybe masking works but there just isn't the evidence available to say that it does. All medical interventions have a cost and it shouldn't be paid by the public without good evidence that it will be worth it.
This video is an excellent discussion of the controversy with the lead author of the Cochrane review of physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses and another epidemiologist from the "Evidence Based Medicine" movement which discounts observational studies. They discuss the evidence including the "Bangladesh RCT," the precautionary principle, equipoise, the reaction to the latest review as compared to previous ones and the actions of Cochrane's director. [1]
[0] https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_JTBftjQuA
b) Covid (especially when you consider using PCR at high cycles to 'detect' it) relied on a model of asymptomatic transmission, when that was never proven
As for the specialists, antidotally, I've never heard a medical doctor claim anything other than a mask is helpful and they all seemed to wear theirs quite happily.
I have grown mushrooms at home for many years and to prevent contamination entering my grain bags and jars, I have to use an extremely fine filters.
I use a Microppose Synthetic Filter Discs which have a 99.97% Filtration efficiency down to 0.22μm (microns).
The standard face mask is 0.3μm and is 95% efficient at 0.3 microns. This means that the filter media is effective at filtering 95% of airborne particles as long as they are larger than 0.3 microns in diameter.
The Coronavirus molecules tend to be about 0.1 microns in diameter
Masks do not prevent Coronavirus molecules from passing through the mask, However, Coronavirus molecules do not float freely around in the air and usually travel around as part of fluid droplets that become airborne created by coughing and sneezing.
These droplets are supposed to be about 0.5μm so the masks could prevent water droplets from entering the body.
I still have my doubts though.
Masks are great to slow the spread of the virus. So if you have a big wedding party coming up you might want to wear a mask in the subway in the weeks before your big day.
But: Masks won't save you from the disease in the long term. There's no way you can escape viral respiratory infections in our society.
Bullshit. 4 years and counting. Understanding your respiratory PPE and utilizing it correctly is a wonderful thing.
I don't remember anyone wearing a mask either in the doctor's waiting room, even when it was fool of sick people (old and young mixed)
* except for dentists, surgeon and their assistants during
We had this police operations too, even in restaurants where you had to have your mask when standing up (like going to the toilet, paying the bill, etc..), but you could take it off at your table.
I remember during the first lock down we were forbidden to go 1.5km from home except to go buy food: there was a large parc close to home so a lot of families would go there to chill, play with kids, do running, etc... but after 3 weeks the police noticed and they were going around in the parc to fine everyone. Most people were more afraid to get caught than to get sick, even old people.
I'm glad, I always found it a super heavy burden, for me even worse than the lockdowns. But this is due to prior respiratory issues and PTSD related to that. For other people it will be a lot easier.
For me I'll just take the risk as it comes, I'm sure it's a bit higher without them but there's many things that can kill you in this life. For me being overweight is probably a lot more likely to do so.
I do agree with you !
Focusing on being healthy is in my opinion way more beneficial to avoid being sick in general than trying to avoid being sick at all cost. Being stacked by millions in cities living unhealthy lives is definitely not helping to prevent being sick. I move to the country side after the last lock down, ~50km from a big city to still be close to work, and it's been very relaxing and good for my family's overall health.
There was a commercial in Holland saying "If you have to watch your life flash before your eyes one day, you'd better make sure it's not going to be boring!". I subscribe to that, although the ad was for the army which I wouldn't find exciting at all :)
But I know many people who love the quiet life. I lived in a small town for a decade but it made me feel so restricted, I deeply hated it. People vary! And I don't have a family even at my age so I'd be pretty lonely outside the city.
If your enjoy your time that's more than enough to continue doing what you do :D
Country # of cases # of deaths
USA 111,820,082 1,219,487
UK 24,910,387 232,112
Japan 33,803,572 74,694
S. Korea 34,571,873 35,934In other words: it's not easy. There are many factors at play.
While masks are shown to slow the spread of infection, ultimately the larger problem with handling the COVID-19 pandemic was the lockdowns and isolation. Lockdowns and isolating individuals definitely helped reduce the spread of the infection and probably saved a lot of lives but prolonged isolation actually reduced the overall immunity in our population. Human immune systems require constant exposure to all sorts of germs to keep it humming along. Isolation does the exact opposite and while it is useful in the short term, prolonged 'clean room' type conditions created due to isolation and lockdowns are harmful.
This is exactly the kind of pseudoscience argument people pull in that muddies the water (on both sides of the debate)
If we look at scientific studies, they also confirm the some effectiveness of masks in reducing the risk of influenza or COVID-19 infection and mortality.
One study on mice, I saw, showed that antiviral-coated masks increase the likelihood of developing immunity to infection BEFORE the infection, because fragments of dead viruses enter the lungs and trigger an immune reaction.
> More studies found that masks (n = 39/47; 83%) and mask mandates (n = 16/18; 89%) reduced infection than found no effect (n = 8/65; 12%) or favoured controls (n = 1/65; 2%). Seven observational studies found that respirators were more protective than surgical masks, while five found no statistically significant difference between the two mask types.
So as a dummy I conclude that masks do work, as expected. But the question is still: Do we need them?
I doubt that study will be conclusive, there are so many possible confounding factors that are hard to account for. Particularly the tactical problem where wearing a mask obviously can stop someone getting COVID in any given encounter, but it is much harder to check if it stops them getting COVID during the pandemic.
If we have a control that moves the world from someone gets COVID during the pandemic to ... someone still gets COVID during the pandemic but a month later then it is unclear what mandates are doing. It'd take more than a study abstract to determine that, it'd take a lot of reading through the specifics to see what is going on.
Changing an exponential process that doubles every week to every 2 weeks is basically doing nothing. Half the population will still be infected in the last step. If spreading the infections over 2 weeks instead of one is important then that might be a win, but everyone seemed to abandon flattening the curve pretty quickly as a strategy.
This is so crazy to me. Maybe it wasn't communicated clear enough, but for me it was always cristal clear that while being outside chances of getting infected are very very small. And people were still afraid and wore masks outside. The government still bullied you, and police could fine you, if you took a stroll during lockdown in germany.
No, I didn't want to go outside or to a party to infect others. I wanted to take a stroll to not kill myself and because I knew there is almost no chance in getting infected or infecting anyone else. And I still was scared of any police car driving past, because the government fucked up. I even remember the news stories of people getting fined because they read a book on a f-in park bench, because they werent allowed to linger outside
There is another world where the pandemic became about telling people to focus on good ventilation and being outside as much as possible. Imagine classes and meetings conducted outside, and everyone just hanging out at the beach and parks.
It almost sounds like we could have ended the pandemic feeling like it improved our mental health.
So there you have it. At very little cost to yourself, you can help protect strangers around you. I promise you those strangers to whom it makes a difference will notice, and you will have their gratitude.
Mind you, if you are only asking from the angle of your own personal well-being, and making a difference to strangers at very little cost to yourself is not something that you can find much interest for, then it's a different question entirely.
Think of it as running publicly facing web service based on an extremely popular software. The sheer amount of skiddy traffic ensures that unless you are diligent and methodic at applying protective measures something will eventually slip through. If your cumulative probability of "catching" something over certain period approaches 1 with a "security" measure on, that measure is effectively ineffective even if you can show efficacy.
Imagine you are an admin on some computer network and notice that a particular node is infected with some worm. Intuitively (or following best practices) you isolate that node first and foremost instead of deploying some protective measures on the rest of the nodes. This approach is more effective due to 1:n relationship in infection spread, where your spread block probability is multiplied by the number of healthy nodes if deploy protective measures on healthy nodes instead of the infected one.
This is masking. Masking is much more effective when deployed on the sick, however for many diseases detection lags behind spread due to symptoms lagging behind infection. So you have this weird tautology. Masking is only effective if the majority of the population, including asymptomatic, uses masks correctly. Otherwise the sheer amount of viral particles one is bombarded with still ensures infection ratio larger than one.
----
> On the one side we have people that say 'our bodies need to learn again to fight against viruses'
Sorry, but this is scientifically dumb take. Yes, immunity against repeat exposure does build up, but you are playing russian roulette. There are no benefits to contracting a "full" disease while there are risks associated with that. Prevention carries much lower risks at similar or better reward.
I never really understand this line of thought. A) where does this the prescription come from? and B) you realize this fight comes with life expectancy deficits, right? You're just borrowing from later in life to pay off today. Why not just avoid it today?
Regardless, it's not difficult to avoid masks being actively harmful to public health.
Even if you didn't notice that back then, all the no-vax groups (that I'm aware of) ultimately became overt supporters of Putin and his invasion of Ukraine.
There was no opposition to the first, much more drastic, measures; that began when governments finally came to do something right (masks and vaccines), and towards things insignificant compared to the previous restrictions.
How many healthy people that died because of covid do you know personally?
How many healthy people that that suddenly got cancer or struggle with conception after 2021 you know personally?
Why is mortality in wealthy countries still rising? https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
What is an origin of covid virus?
To get a quote from Baric unrelated to origins, when that fellow is at the absolute epicenter of FOIA litigation (led by USRighttoKnow) on the topic, is simple journalistic malpractice.
It's like we got in a car crash and instead of taking about how we can be safer drivers we're debating which brand of crutches is best.
I wish we'd zoom out a bit and look for some more impactful questions to ask. Questions like:
- How many fewer pandemics would we have if we stopped eating mammals?
- Does dwindling diversity among wild animals make for greater risk? (Presumably so, because the remaining ones start to look like a monoculture) How can we prioritize the types of conservation work that most effectively mitigate this?
- How much more effective could our vaccines be if we equipped people with the genes for CAS9? (Such that our vaccines could be CRISPR targeting RNA).
- How much better could our surveillance be if it were more common to sequence samples from sick people? How much cheaper does sequencing need to get before that can happen? Can we achieve that with policy alone or is there engineering work to do?
It also matters when the basic doctor-patient relationship is interfered with
COVID-19 ORIGIN: COVID-19 most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. The FIVE strongest arguments in favor of the “lab leak” theory include:
1) The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature.
Yes.
2) Data shows that all COVID-19 cases stem from a single introduction into humans. This runs contrary to previous pandemics where there were multiple spillover events.
Yes.
3) Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research at inadequate biosafety levels.
Other biolabs can match this description too.
4) Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with a COVID-like virus in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market.
Covid-like virus is not a Covid-19.
5) By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced.
Yes.
So, yes, it realy looks like a leak from a biolab or a deliberate spreading of the virus in preparation to a war or a trade war.
Otherwise I might not be so gung ho about it. I would have accepted "sorry, it got out, it's our fault". Accidents happen, but not when you coerce, censor, and make illegal (certain early treatment drugs) tools in the toolkit to fight the virus
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That part of the world has a biolab doing gain of function research on that kind of virus because that part of the world has had problems with that kind of virus in the past. It receives finding from other countries because now that we know the source of the threat it makes sense to study it on the correct side of the world.
Zoonotic diseases are ecosystems' hedge against diversity loss and Chinas rapid growth in the last 50y has put a strain on local species such that it has activated twice before. They'd be negligent not to be attempting to prepare for a third event. Maybe they went too far in their strategy, maybe they screwed up in their containment practices, but 99-100% of this this is a nature-made weapon.
Maybe a lab managed to carve their initials into it somewhere. But we're never going to get good information about whether that's the case. Yet we're still all amped about that maybe-1% even though there's a lot of other things we could learn from here--things which nobody has any reason to spread misinformation about, and which could prevent a lot of hardship.
In short:
1) WIV proposed to modify CoV virus to infect humans in same way as SARS CoV2 using BSL-2 lab to save costs (see screenshot). BSL-2 means that protective masks are not required.
2) No such variation of CoV virus is found in nature.
3) Paper written by Dr. Baric and Dr. Shi which describes how to perform that insertion of furin cleavage sites into SARS CoV.
So, arguments in favor of accidental leak from Chines WIH lab are strong.
However, I'm biased against Russia (it saves lot of time), so I see few more arguments in favor of accidental leak from Chinese «Vector» lab in Koltsevo (Novosibirsk), which then transferred to Wuhan by Wuhan military police after shared military training with Russian military police in Koltsevo, because «Vector» BSL-4 lab had major incident (small bang and fire which broke windows, then doors are broken and equipment is stolen by Russian military looking for a fire) few weeks before that training. Paper with instructions was published, so it was open knowledge, so Russians may tried to reproduce it in preparation to the war.
[1]: https://oversight.house.gov/release/final-report-covid-selec...
[2]: https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/2024....
[3]: https://meduza.io/en/news/2024/12/19/trump-s-ukraine-envoy-n...
It's called a spillover event and not a spillover status quo because it's new to us. To argue that it's manmade because we didn't see it coming is a gross overestimation of man's ability to make such things and of his ability to anticipate them. Even if we can glue things together that we found in nature, the threatening part is not the glue.
The rest appears to be politics and has no bearing on what science might learn from COVID. Especially the first link, which reads more like a bunch of people patting their boss on the back in hopes that they don't get fired and nothing like the result of any kind of research. Nevermind their conflict of interest, what would congresspeople know about it in the first place?
Some may release viruses of surprising structure on purpose or by accident, and nature does it also. That makes it relevant to understand ways to prevent and mitigate the impact of such events, but the nationalities of the people involved just doesn't impact the science in any way.
I would be interested in reading the paper about the furin cleavage. Are you sure your link 3 is going to the right place?
It more interesting HOW this fragment get there. Recombination with an other virus is ruled out, so only 3 options are left: 1) virus evolved in an animal (none found), 2) virus evolved in a human (none found), 3) virus created in a lab (paper exists with exact instruction how to do it).
Yes, third link is not correct. It just catches my attention, because if Russians did it (accidentally or not) then general Kirilov must be responsible for it, so the link between Kellog (Trump) and Kirilov (Putin) surprised me.
Do you suppose that the other such cases happened in a lab also? Or could it be that evolution favors the adaptation because it makes for a fitter virus?
Viruses are not alive, so evolution cannot be performed without a chain (tree) of host animals and/or humans. However, in this case, it looks like it was jump, not evolution. At one point of time we see the virus in wild without ability to easily infect humans, then at another point in time we see the almost same virus, but perfectly adapted to infect humans, and nothing between them.
If this was an evolution in the wild, then thousands, maybe millions, of "almost SARS CoV2" cases should surface after years of search. They are not found, thus evolution happened in a closed environment, like a secret cave or a biolab.
I question that assumption. Evolution happens in tiny bursts (founder organisms, population bottlenecks, etc) in between which are relatively long periods of Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (i.e. periods where evolution is not happening). That's why when we look into the fossil record we're (typically) able classify our findings as one of several stable species, rather than some sort of smooth spectrum in which everything is equally represented a transitional state to something else.
There's a very strong sampling bias where you're much more likely to find an organism in equilibrium and not an individual that was part of whatever transition you're interested in. If this were not the case, the existence of evolution would've been a no-brainer rather than a discovery that biologists had to fight to establish.
In the last 4 years there have been 20 variants of concern, but currently there are only two (https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/covid-19/variants-concern). So on average these populations only last something like six months before they're outcompeted by a new variant--and that's six months for populations in equilibrium. If you're looking to collect a sample in a non-equilibrium state, it seems likely to me that your window for doing so might only last a few weeks.
So they're looking for the missing link, and they haven't found it yet. But it's not clear how likely they are to ever find it, so the jump from "they haven't found it" to "it was never in nature" is not warranted.
One experiment that could be done, which I think would shed light on the situation, would be sample modern humans in an attempt to find the first variant (discovered in 2019). If we find it easily, maybe we should expect to find its ancestors relatively easily, supposing they're out there (never mind that animals are harder to work with than humans). Then again, it may be extinct, in which case we should probably not hold our breaths about finding its ancestor either.
But sequencing experiments cost on the order of $100-$1000 to do, so neither my proposed experiment nor the quest to find the reservoir species are likely to happen at a scale of
> thousands, maybe millions, of ... cases
Sure, you might get more than one virus per sample, but typically the way to sort that out is to align the reads (typically 100-200 nucleotides long) to a reference genome. It works well when your sample came from one individual with genetically identical cells. I'm not sure how quickly things get murky when you've got a pile of reads from a sample with hundreds or thousands of genetically dissimilar viral particles, plus whatever non-viral DNA ended up in the sample, but I'd be surprised if you could get more than 10 or 20 reliable alignments out of it. Eventually your error bars are going to get too big and you're not going to know which data goes which which sites. I haven't worked with an assay like that before but I'm positive that there are going to be limits to how much you can squeeze out of a single run.
By looking at genome of virus strain and knowing rate of mutations and number of hosts, we can calculate the time passed between them. By testing immune response for variants of the virus, we can find the person, who was infected first, AKA «patient zero», then look for a nearby cave and find the animal, which started the infection.
So, by prediction, the infection in humans started at Sep-Oct 2019. First known patient in China was infected in Nov 2019: too late for the «patient zero». It means that infection, most likely, originated outside of China, where original bat virus was found. So, we will NEVER find a cave in China with pre-covid19 virus, because infection started outside of China. 0
The cave with pre-covid virus is in China, but infection started outside of China. WTF?
Explosion at «Vector» lab, Koltsevo, Novosibirsk, Siberia, Russia was at Sep 16 2019, so we have match here. +1
Joint training of Chinese from Wuhan and Russian military police was started at Oct 11, 2019. They cannot bring infection from China to Russia because first case in China was in November, but Chinese police can be infected in Russia and return to China with infection in late October-November. +1
First report in media about sudden increase in cases of atypical pneumonia (start of infection) in Krasnoyark Krai, Siberia (700 cases per week) was at Oct 16, 2019. +1
So, we have 0 points in favor of animal origin, and 3 points in favor of lab origin.
Basically none of the reporting on it was accurate. I had it two weeks prior to the first reported case in my state and was told that "everybody who needs a test can get one" and was unable to get a test because I wasn't sick enough to justify it (which is fine, but if that's how your surveillance works then your data is useless).
It's a big cloud of lies and I just don't see the utility of peering into it and trying to assign blame when that same energy could be put towards being prepared for next time.
> let’s modify peoples’ genes and make them eat bugs
The only part of the human genome that would need to change for this is the one that puts the scissors (CAS-9) in place for later use. I suppose since we'd have them lying around we might later want to use them for more invasive gene therapies which do target the human genome, but that would be a separate decision for a later date.
As for the diet part... if nature is going to force our hand here one way or another, we might as well handle things on our own terms. Or maybe nature isn't going to. But that's the kind of thing a scientist would study in the wake of a pandemic if we weren't all so toxic about it. Maybe we'll be more interested in prevention after there are a few more of these and COVID starts looking like the warning shot that we ignored.
I have grown mushrooms at home for many years and to prevent contamination entering my grain bags and jars, I have to use an extremely fine filters.
I use a Microppose Synthetic Filter Discs which have a 99.97% Filtration efficiency down to 0.22μm (microns).
The standard face mask is 0.3μm and is 95% efficient at 0.3 microns. This means that the filter media is effective at filtering 95% of airborne particles as long as they are larger than 0.3 microns in diameter.
The Coronavirus molecules tend to be about 0.1 microns in diameter
Masks do not prevent Coronavirus molecules from passing through the mask, However, Coronavirus molecules do not float freely around in the air and usually travel around as part of fluid droplets that become airborne created by coughing and sneezing.
These droplets are supposed to be about 0.5μm so the masks could prevent water droplets from entering the body.
I still have my doubts though.
Telling people under 18 to get the vaccine or not attend school, or that vaccine immunity was somehow magically better than natural immunity were the two things that really turned me against it. And this is after I myself got the vaccine very early (March 21), because I trusted the science.
Now I have no trust in anything the government or any pharma company tells me anymore because it’s clear we have been lied to on several levels.
> “One of the big reasons we wanted to hold this conference is because we couldn’t meet in person during the pandemic,” said virologist Kei Sato of the University of Tokyo, an organizer
Maybe the "massive gravitational pull to what we were doing before" is just a natural equilibrium state. If we didn't behave this way we'd still be locked inside our homes fearing the virus. The fact that only 1000 people died from it in 2024 in the US is proof enough that this specific pandemic is over.
I’m not sure if you got that number from the article, but if you did, that’s per week (but in the whole world, with 75% in the US):
> Figures from October 2024 showed at least 1000 people died from COVID-19 each week, 75% of them in the United States, and that’s relying only on data from the 34 countries that still report deaths to the World Health Organization (WHO)
Not debating whether or not it’s “over”, but if you’re going by that number, your number is about 40x off.
Every time one of these goes endemic, the immune systems of all future humans get a slightly heavier burden to bear. The effect of all those passengers adds up. We'll eventually have a make or break moment and fail because we're in a viral haze and not thinking clearly. It's worth learning from the past so we can forestall that moment as long as possible.
I don't think that means more isolation. I think it means more thinking about the ecology of zoonotic diseases. Less contact with risky organisms, maybe we change our diet or where we decide to build, etc.
Unless that percentage is an artifact of more accurate reporting in the US, I am now even more disappointed in the state of US health care and public health.