zlacker

> You might want to check that. Afaik, it is 4 months .

You might want to check THAT out.

They found other species could be infected with SARS-CoV-1 after 4 months and hypothesized that civet cats were the intermediate species, but that still hasn't been proven yet.

After the discovery of SARS-like WIV1 in bats in Yunnan in 2013 it was determined in 2016 that WIV1 or a very closely related virus may have jumped directly to humans:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_SARS-like_coronavirus_WIV1

And specifically reference 4:

https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048

"Both full-length and chimeric WIV1-CoV readily replicated efficiently in human airway cultures and in vivo, suggesting capability of direct transmission to humans."

So we STILL don't quite understand the origin of SARS1 and if it used an intermediate species or not.

There's still a very similar mystery as to how the closest animal coronavirus is found in a bat in Yunnan, but it showed up in humans in Guangdong roughly 700 miles away (but since it was in 2003 and there's no biological lab in Guangdong there's no competing lab-leak hypothesis over SARS1, even though the observation is exactly the same).

>>lamont+(OP)
Thanks for adding that. I didn't mean to come across as passive-aggressive.

So if I understand right. While SARS1 was found in civets within 4 months of it being discovered, we have recently (2017) also found it in Bats. Current Phylogenetic studies indicate that the Bats are more likely to have been the original reservoir.

>>screye+n5
Well we already guessed it came from bats first, we've just more recently found the probable progenitor virus in bats (still not sure if it was that exact virus or a sibling, but its very close).

And we found it in civets but that doesn't prove that humans caught it from civets, it could be the other way around, just like SARS-CoV-2 and the minks in Denmark.

The fact that WIV1 seems to infect humans also doesn't rule out the possibility that there might still be an intermediate animal like civets. It is suggestive that there's no need for an intermediate animal, but that doesn't prove anything either way.

So we found a similar virus in civets in 2003 and jumped to a conclusion very fast. We have also found that SARS-CoV-2 infects all kinds of other animals and have found it in them, but we assume most of them caught SARS-CoV-2 from humans due to the massive pandemic going on this time. The few viruses we found in e.g. pangolins don't seem to be similar enough to have passed from pangolins to humans or vice versa. The bat coronavirus we already knew about (RaTG13) is somewhat close but would have needed a decade or two to mutate into SARS-CoV-2.

So we can't say that much for certain about either SARS-1 or SARS-2 at this point, even though we're 18 years or so past SARS-1 we still don't have all the answers.