So are you proposing that a pangolin from Lancang was transported more than 2000km to a seafood wetmarket in Wuhan?
At face value, this sounds like a very unlikely scenario for a zoonotic event/origin.
[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2020/04/coronavir...
Assuming a zoonotic origin in China, it's much more likely that an infected individual from rural Southern China happened to travel to Wuhan and that the seafood market just happened to be the kind of location where such a virus would spread. There is some evidence that there is a degree of immunity to COVID-19 in areas that had SARS-outbreaks. It would therefore be plausible that an initial COVID-19 outbreak in Southern China, the epicenter of SARS1, could have gone unnoticed.
The actual animals sold at the market would then be irrelevant, but there's a narrative that "animal cruelty and human encroachment are to blame for COVID" that is being pushed here.
Likewise, Italy contained the virus from May to September, then it exploded again. Nothing particularly happened in September, yet by chance it spiked.
Just speculating though, I’d like to hear others’ opinion on this thought.
> Shi’s team used the antibody test to narrow down the list of locations and bat species to pursue in the quest for genomic clues. After roaming mountainous terrain in most of China’s dozens of provinces, the researchers turned their attention to one spot: Shitou Cave, on the outskirts of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, where they conducted intense sampling during different seasons over five consecutive years.
Distance from Kumming to Wuhan: 1,566 km [2].
Distance from Kumming to Foshan (SARS-1): 1,315 km [3].
I am saying that horseshoe bats, pangolins, palm civets, and humans overlap in Yunnan province and along the Langcang/Mekong. This is the most likely ground zero for a natural recombination event. When and how the first SARS-CoV-2 virus made its way to Wuhan is a separate question; I'd think a human on a train is the most likely vector.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-wo...
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Wuhan,+Hubei,+China/Kunming,...
[3] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Foshan,+Guangdong+Province,+...
"In May 2020, George Gao, the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said animal samples collected from the seafood market had tested negative for the virus, indicating that the market was the site of an early superspreading event, but it was not the site of the initial outbreak.[43]"
https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-rules-out-animal-market-a...
I can't find references now but the idea that the virus started in Wuhan roughly early November and that the Huanan market was just a notable superspreading event which brought attention to the virus is pretty accepted in scientific circles. The virus was too well adpated to humans initially and has not evolved significantly since its first detection then (D614G and the new variants aside).
The animals that carried the virus in the Huanan market were probably just an infected human, and not particularly close to the origin case.
It was just detected there because it was a superspreading event that happened in the backyard of the nearby lab.
The most plausible explanation I've heard as an origin is that it jumped from bat to human in the process of bat guano farming. This would have obviously happened in the rural area outside of Wuhan, but the virus found its way through spreading events into the higher density city, where it was eventually detected. Cryptic spread would have been happening for at least a month or more as it adapted to humans.
The furin cleavage site may also be the result of a recombination event between two coronaviruses (coronaviruses don't just mutation and reassortment like influenza, they also recombine and dual infection with two coronaviruses in an animal or human can shuffle parts of genes):
https://jvi.asm.org/content/84/7/3134?ijkey=b8e66cb01995eeb4...
So if you just assume that trajectory from bat guano farming to city center, along with a missing link to provide the furin cleavage site, then the title articles analysis really falls apart. Not surprising that the bats are far away, the furin cleavage site may be not surprising if we manage to find a similar virus in nature, and mostly what is left is that it wasn't detected until it was right on the doorstep of the virology lab (where the virus found the people who were likely to set off the alarm about it) and the rest some mild cover-your-ass at the lab would be entirely expected.
But that means that there's some bats with answers somewhere outside of Wuhan but China has been stalling efforts to go find them.
There is no direct air flight from Italy to Wuhan without going through Amsterdam Schipol or Beijing. There are no Shipping ports in inland Wuhan.
Do you truly believe it is a realistic scenario that a virus this infectious could traverse from northern Italy to Wuhan, Hubei, without creating multiple infection hotspots along the way?
If I am to put on my tinfoil hat this is exactly the sort of disinformation I would expect from CCP propaganda in order to fight US politician memes of the "China Virus".
The often believed but not proven
>"start of this pandemic was in 'Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market' in Wuhan."
To:
> It was produced in a Lab.
Is IMHO a fully unreasonable jump of conclusions. Given that analysis in the recent year showed that the virus spread much earlier and initially undetected to the EU it is quite feasible that the epidemic in China started earlier and potential in different places then Wuhan.
Also one big point ignored is both pangolin and bat are captured (sometimes alive) and kept/transported potentially close together. So even if there is a natural place where they would interact there are "unnatural" places created by the nature of the (not just seafood) marked in Wuhan...
(1): I probably should use "unidentified", it was noticed that there was a unusual spike in pneumonia related death. It was just not linked to a "new" virus.
Assuming that Wuhan is the Orginal point of infection and there not being any previous infections spreading it to some parts of china including (or mainly) Wuhan is the actual extraordinary claim.
> There is no direct ...
Doesn't matter people travel. My sister had during that time a roommate from China from a large city without any direct flights or port or similar if that would have been Wuhan here bringing the virus to Germany before any travel restrictions started would have been well in the area of possibitly (and no joke as far as I remember it actually was Wuhan but I'm not fully sure about and no Virus was transmitted in this case it's just an example that the argument why virus transmittance is unlikely is IMHO not making much sense)
EDIT:
> without creating multiple infection hotspots along the way?
1. There where other hotspots then Wuhan.
2. Detection and reporting of SARS-Cov-2 was initially not very responsive.
3. Look at how SARS-Cov-1 spread.
4. You just need a exchange student from Wuhan to Italy.
Bats can easily come in close contacts with people and cattle even when they are not actively hunted.
You also make a good point that we're discovering very early cases in the EU and US, which show that this all started earlier than the explosion in Wuhan.
I seem to recall reading articles suggesting that the jump to humans may have occurred more than a year before Wuhan.
Could we also stop dropping "CCP propaganda" everytime someone writes something others disagree with?
What facts support a European source for SARS-Cov2, that then stealthily traversed two continents, to then super spread in Wuhan, Hubei?
Now, I believe that the claim about Italy was a bit tongue in cheek but at the same time it is reasonable based on facts and should be thought provoking:
We now know that there were cases of Covid-19 in Italy and France, and perhaps US iirc, at the same time, and perhaps before, the outbreak around that market in Wuhan, as early as November. (So, yes the virus did stealthily traverse continents, by the way)
Now, based on that why would the origin necessarily be Wuhan? Logically, the earlier the cases the closer they are from origin.
The origin of infectious diseases is always tricky to establish. After years we're still not sure about the origin of MERS and possibly SARS. It took decades to pinpoint that HIV appeared in the 1920s, almost 60 years before it can to the world's attention.
While it is still most likely that Covid-19 arose in China we do not know where and when.
Can you provide a peer-reviewed source that documents this timeline, you claim "established facts" but to my knowledge there aren't any?
> While it is still most likely that Covid-19 arose in China we do not know where and when.
On that we can both agree.
In Italy people were contaminated even earlier than that, apparently [4].
These are not wholly surprising because, again it is likely that the virus had been circulating for some time in humans before it exploded and was detected. It is quite contagious but many people do not experience any symptoms or only mild, common symptoms, which IMO makes it relatively easy to go undetected until it goes out out of hands, as it did in Wuhan first.
It's good to ask for proof but then you should ask for proof of all claims, not only the ones you do not like.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52526554
[2] https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-report...
[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/new-evidence-race-find-fr...
[4] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-...
In France; December 2019: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7196402/
> His previous experience has shown that such antibody tests for the coronavirus' RBD can create a lot of false positives, Rutherford told Live Science. And because this is "such an unexpected finding," it should be confirmed with other antibody tests such as those that look for antibodies against another one of the coronavirus' proteins, an outer coat called a "nucleocapsid," which is also unique to the novel coronavirus, he said.
> Still, "it's not totally outside the realm of possibility," that the virus circulated in Italy earlier than thought. because there is a lot of travel back and forth between China and Italy, especially northern Italy, he said. But considering the earliest COVID-19 case in Wuhan was reported to be in November, "it really gives me pause to say let's really make sure we got this right before we try and explain it," Rutherford said. [0]
[0] https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-circulating-italy-ea...
I'm puzzled by your attitude and unclear about your aim but you do what you want.
Sure - I'm not quite sure what the issue is.
A single person X becomes infected mid-week in Europe. Monday they leave for China. The next Thursday, they have a business meeting in China where they are symptomatic but have suppressed obvious symptoms with OTC cold medication - who wouldn't if you flew thousands of miles for a meeting?
A dozen people sit in a room in Wuhan with some infected person for several hours.
---
> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
An "extraordinary claim" is along the lines of UFOs, ghosts and goblins.
There are hundreds of millions of international passengers a year. That an unknown infectious disease could travel from Europe to Asia undetected is hardly an "extraordinary claim".
Pending any hard evidence at all, it can only be described as a hypothesis.
Seems like you are trying to ridicule me just because you disagree with me.
'Wuhan Institute of Virology' (China's only BSL4 lab) is less than 14km from 'Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market'.
The 'Wuhan Centre for Disease Prevention & Control' is 1.4 km from the 'Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market'.
Both are public institutions with published research on both virus classification and gain of function experiments.
This is circunstancial evidence. Unlike the previous origin investigation for SARS-Cov1, there has been little transparence or effort to investigate the origin of SARS-Cov2.
Let's agree to disagree. If indeed the origin is a Southern China zoonotic event, which then happened to have a superspreader event in Wuhan, then it is in the interest of the Chinese government to investigate this and disclose this evidence to dissolve international doubts and concerns.
No, we can't drop "CCP propaganda" fact. Man, they put DOCTORS doing their job to prisons ! Actually we shoud be more concerned about such idiocy ! Where is logic in that ? Looks more like mentality from few hundreds years ago reborn in autocratic country. Communists usually give orders for achievements :>
But yes, as you pointed, not everything is "CCP propaganda" and such meme is often trown in unresponsible way.
And yes, pointing earlier cases in Europe is good to know too. But in Europe there was cases (x-rays photos, can't find info about dead cases) in September / November but in China there was EPIDEMY in early November. Still, all that is not a proof about origin of patient zero. And Wuhan could be it.