zlacker

You don’t think non-scientists have any reason to go into remote bat caves even though bat guano is an incredibly valuable substance?

>>peter4+(OP)
How would guano miners then get to Wuhan and get sick without leaving a trail of infections along the way?

>>peter4+(OP)
Non-scientists obviously go into bat caves all the time, for guano collection, mining, etc. This certainly is a possible pathway for the emergence of zoonotic diseases, including SARS-CoV-2. Those aren't the bat caves I was referring to, though.

The WIV and Wuhan CDC sent grad students to hike through the wilderness to remote bat caves too far from any road or farm to have been exploited yet for any practical use. They chose those caves based on their expert predictions of where they expected to see the greatest diversity of novel coronaviruses.

There's obviously far fewer WIV grad students than guano harvesters; but the risk per person seems orders of magnitude higher, for an expert deliberately seeking a virus vs. a merely indifferent laborer. So that seems like a new and non-negligible risk to me, and thus one that requires investigation. Note that I'm not alone in this; Marc Lipsitch, for example, often mentions this possible pathway.

>>kaesar+X
Good question; I would guess that like SARS and MERS, whichever viruses they picked up, assuming that's what happened, didn't transmit well.

That's one of the independent vectors the author mentions that makes so many of us suspect very specifically a lab leak of a gain of function experiment: the virus started out very well adapted to humans.

>>kaesar+X
Very easily, you can get to the other side of the world before you even become infectious, which can be days after contracting the virus. Even if there were a trail of infectious they were probably chalked up as the flu and is likely to be undetected. If it was spreading then the virus may not have been adapted enough for the explosive growth we saw in Wuhan.

>>Throwa+O3
A lot of emerging viruses are well adapted to humans… that’s why become outbreaks. How can you judge what level of adaption is expected vs unexpected in a virus.

Most virologists say the way this virus works is unlike anything they’ve seen or expected so they can’t imagine how a human would have engineered it. Why do you think your feeling about the virus’s level of adaptation trumps the experts opinions?

>>peter4+t7
How can you judge what level of adaption is expected vs unexpected in a virus.

It's a long article so I don't expect you to find the argument in it; it highlights the work of Alina Chan who compared a fast mutation rate of SARS-CoV as it better adapted itself to human to SARS-CoV-2. Here are titles of three of them I've saved but not read, May through September of last year:

SARS-CoV-2 is well adapted for humans. What does this mean for re-emergence?

Single source of pangolin CoVs with a near identical Spike RBD to SARS-CoV-2

COVID-19 CG: Tracking SARS-CoV-2 mutations by locations and dates of interest

>>peter4+t7
"A lot of emerging viruses are well adapted to humans…"

This is literally not true.

Most virologists say the way this virus works is unlike anything they’ve seen or expected so they can’t imagine how a human would have engineered it. Why do you think your feeling about the virus’s level of adaptation trumps the experts opinions?

1) Citation on "most" please. The world is a big place, so you will be able to find a citation for any opinion. If you are going to say "most" then please back it up with a source.

2) gain-of-function research doesn't require a human to engineer a new virus. It is a way to essentially speed up evolution and allow nature to do the heavy lifting. You're arguing points that no on here is making.