zlacker

>>pseudo+(OP)
Current bottom line:

- 1st response to CoVID occurrence was certainly in Wuhan.

- The closest wild strain of CoVID happens in bats living thousand kilometres from Wuhan

- Wuhan had two institutes which, on record, did gain of function experiments on bat coronaviruses

- Beijing purposefully destroyed DNA evidence, and obliterated the team who first sequenced the CoVID genome

- Chinese authorities were scrambling, and suppressing reporting as early as November, seemingly with a very good idea what they are up to.

>>baybal+5u
Additionally, no animal in the wild had been found to carry the virus

>>AzzieE+QV
cough

How about those several million minks in Denmark?

https://www.who.int/csr/don/03-december-2020-mink-associated...

>>justin+qj1
Well to be pedantic for fun, those minks aren't "wild". A quote from your reference: >the virus that causes COVID-19, on mink farms in Denmark.

>>kevins+Hk1
That's not pedantic. Farm minks aren't wild animals, period. They're domesticated.

>>monoid+Jm1
I was wondering about this. Because yeah these minks don't grow up in the wild, but at the same time, domestication is an actual evolutionary process. So can they be considered domesticated just because they were raised in a cage?

>>kevins+8r1
> So can they be considered domesticated just because they were raised in a cage?

Yes, most definitely. Over many generations. They're the same species as wild minks, but domesticated (just as dogs are same species as wolves, but domesticated).

And the scientific community agrees. For example, see this paper: https://bioone.org/journals/wildlife-biology/volume-15/issue...

It's true that they've not been domesticated as long as dogs, for example, but there are clear morphological differences between the two.

Most importantly for our conversation, infectious diseases can behave very differently in wild and domestic populations, for reasons of population density, immune status, etc.