[workingdog]

We need to know so we can understand what we're doing that could lead to another disaster.

Among the possibilities: wet markets, exploring caves, gain of function research, unclean cooking practices, or it could be just bad luck.

Each of those would lead us to drastically differing ways of trying to mitigate the next virus.

[kevviiinn]

>Each of those would lead us to drastically differing ways of trying to mitigate the next virus.

Except we did already know some stuff but a bunch of people ignored it anyway, including chunks of the government. We learned from past viruses and a certain admin just decided to ditch the literal playbook

[barney54]

Both the Trump and Biden administrations ditched the playbook. It is depressing.

[LorenPechtel]

They *always* do.

Acknowledging an outbreak means an economic hit to the area where it is. Officials *never* react in time to actually stop it because by the time it's obvious there's a problem it's already spread.

How far it spreads comes down to how well it spreads and how well it resists efforts to stomp it out.

SARS had low infectivity and showed symptoms before it became contagious--isolating the infected was possible. The world jumped on it and managed to fence it into extinction. (Note, however, that whatever the precursor was it wasn't ever identified.)

MERS simply doesn't spread well regardless of containment.

Covid-19, however, spreads mostly before symptoms show. This makes containment very hard--China was able to stop it with draconian lockdowns but even that doesn't work against the Omicron variants, it's simply not possible to isolate people well enough. (There are documented cases of it spreading through walls--the only way to be sure it doesn't spread is with a negative pressure room. It probably can't spread through a truly solid wall but most walls are not.)

[autoexec]

> it's simply not possible to isolate people well enough. (There are documented cases of it spreading through walls

that's... dramatic. It's an airborne virus that spread throughout a very badly constructed and poorly ventilated building that was literally filled with infected people.

The virus spreads easily, but it's far from impossible to keep it from spreading, as evidenced by the many people who have never caught it. There are a lot of variables that determines if someone gets sick after exposure. Someone can be in the same household with a person who has it and still never get sick. Containment is challenging, but not impossible, and it's probably not coming through the walls to get you.

Take sensible steps, and you've got a pretty good shot at avoiding getting infected as long as you aren't locked in a shitty hotel filled with holes and gaps in the walls where there are infected people all around you.

[yarg]

> because by the time it's obvious there's a problem it's already spread.

That doesn't quite ring true to me - there's a difference between 'obvious to the public' and 'obvious to the experts'.

The problem is that if you respond to the experts, the problems don't eventuate, and the public goes "well what was all the fuss?".

We saw that with SARS. People were actually criticising the (then competent) WHO for their zealous response.

You get praised for fixing problems; you get shat on for preventing them.

[LorenPechtel]

The politicians are rarely experts. Your last sentence does basically say what I'm saying, though.

[holografix]

> There are documented cases of it spreading through walls

Source?

[autoexec]

Not the person you're replying to but:

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/28/12/22-0666_article

I wouldn't worry too much about it though. I put it firmly in the possible but extremely unlikely category. I've seen other papers talking about the possibly of it spreading through apartment buildings though plumbing and air vents, and also spreading via shared spaces like hallways and elevators.

In the end, it's all a numbers game. If enough of the virus wafts your way and your immune system can't deal with it before it gets a foothold and spreads you'll get infected. If you've got a hole in the wall between you and your neighbor and your neighbor is sick and their virus is shedding like a stressed cat you might get sick too. We've also got plenty of cases where someone is living in the same household as someone infected and they don't get sick. It's really just down to the amount of exposure/viral load, and the immune system of the person exposed.

[LorenPechtel]

Yup, that's the research I was thinking of. Note that the transmission did occur, admittedly at a fairly low level.

China is full of buildings with many, many residents and far from airtight. Many buildings over there also do not use p-traps. SARS has been documented to spread through the sewer stack this way, Omicron spreads *far* better than SARS.

[metadat]

The claim is of the specious and super-bogus-misinformation variety.

We now understand how COVID infections occur:

As a function of viral load due to exposure via inhalation of exhaled droplets transmitted through air shared with someone shedding the virus.

https://www.michigan.gov/coronavirus/frequently-asked-questi...

[yarg]

Fuck me, a quantum tunnelling virus.

[LorenPechtel]

No, it's that walls aren't normally airtight. All the documented cases involved situations where there was behind-the-scenes holes (utility accesses etc) even though there was nothing on the surface.

[MichaelZuo]

Can you explain how each scenario would "lead us to drastically differing ways of trying to mitigate the next virus."?

There doesn't seem to be a practical way to control all known bat caves or unsanitary cooking practices.

Controlling the illegal wildlife trade would require a huge government commitment which doesn't seem like a viable option.

[ratg13]

If we know it came out of a lab, there would be a stronger call for internationalized safety precautions.

As it stands now, BSL3/BSL4 are totally arbitrary depending on what country you are in.

[yunwal]

> gain of function research

[MichaelZuo]

The parent comment addressed that if you read it carefully.

[haswell]

The parent comment asserted that it should be banned regardless, but arguably if such research was discovered to be the cause, it would be banned far more swiftly.

[MichaelZuo]

I'm not quite sure if that was their meaning, since banning amateur GoF research in practice is impossible. Nor would any major country allow external inspectors into such highly classified areas. So there's no way of independently verifying claims of 'banning' in any case.

[chitowneats]

China boasts about successfully reigning in things like drug trafficking/use, cryptocurrency investment, firearms ownership, liberal reforms and revolutions, etc. They can even prevent you from using basic public services if your state-assigned social credit score is too low.

Are they lying about this? Exaggerating it in some major way? If not, I see no reason they can't shut down big wet markets like the one in Wuhan.

I'm left to assume they know that COVID-19 did not originate in such a place. If it had, there would be an "all hands on deck" campaign by the security services to shut these markets down. It would be accompanied by a massive propaganda effort to convince average Chinese that wild and exotic meat is unsafe.

[Supermancho]

> If it had, there would be an "all hands on deck" campaign by the security services to shut these markets down.

You're making a lot of rational deductions from assumptions of rational behavior without taking into consideration the backpressure (or negative consequences) that rational behavior will cause.

eg If you start an exotic meat campaign, that's an implicit admission that it's a source (if not THE source) and you'll lose your position/head over suggesting it. Even if you could get some momentum, wherever you focus that campaign becomes the defacto ground zero. etc etc etc.

[chitowneats]

> eg If you start an exotic meat campaign, that's an implicit admission that it's a source (if not THE source) and you'll lose your position/head over suggesting it

Isn't it the official position of Xi Jinping, and the broader CCP he controls, that it was from the Wuhan wet market?

I fail to understand why this is not a target for reform in China. "One bad apple", I guess.

Plausible, but not believable, from my perspective.

[MichaelZuo]

Did you reply to the wrong comment?

[chitowneats]

No, I was casting doubt on this:

"Controlling the illegal wildlife trade would require a huge government commitment which doesn't seem like a viable option."

Why isn't it viable if it would prevent a pandemic? They already implement many other authoritarian policies (supposedly successfully) that are meant to curb far less dangerous outcomes.

[LorenPechtel]

Short of basically stopping any contact between humans and non-humans we aren't going to stop it. Finding the exact route this one took (which is probably impossible--the local officials destroyed as much possible evidence as they could trying, as local officials tend to, to not take the economic hit) says nothing about the exact route the next one will take.

[droopyEyelids]

You've fallen for the "all or nothing" fallacy of security.

In reality, securing something means taking steps to reduce the probability of the event, and reducing the impact of the event when it occurs.

[LorenPechtel]

You're treating the event as a binary--but it isn't. Zoonotic jumps happen when you have an animal virus capable of infecting humans and you have contact between humans and said animal. The thing is such contacts aren't a one-off, if the potential exists sooner or later it's pretty much bound to happen.

What we should be doing is studying the viruses that appear to have the potential to be pandemics. We got lucky in this regard with Covid--we didn't actually engineer a vaccine in a year. Rather, we had been working on a SARS vaccine for many years, it had been taken as far as it could be without human trials (and since there were no cases of SARS around human trails were impossible.) The mRNA Covid vaccines are simply the old SARS vaccine with some tiny edits to the payload--what took the year was the human trials, not the creation of the vaccine. That took IIRC 2 days.

[majormajor]

Setting aside the "active research" one, which is rather different than the rest of your list: given the amount of things we (earth-level "we", not a specific government) know increase risk of cancer or other health issues, but that we willingly tolerate for lack of alternatives... what changes do you really think would happen around things like cave exploration, wet markets (farmers markets too, or do you mean specifically just more unusual foods?), cooking practices?

[theGnuMe]

I hate to break it to you but all human activity is the problem. Viruses will jump species and eventually hit pandemic levels. Research is required to minimize their impact. The bird flu could mutate and broadly infect humans killing millions. Swine flu likewise.

[baja_blast]

> The bird flu could mutate and broadly infect humans killing millions

Yes, but when humans are infected it takes a while for the virus to adapt the mutations needed to efficiently spread human to human. This was the case for SARS/MERS/Bird Flu. But in the lab they can insert FCS that are extremely effective at entering human cells and spreading. So if any of these research studies leaks out of the lab there is no way to contain it. Besides we have been conducting this research for decades and it did not help fight or predict this pandemic and in fact these researchers refuse to even share records/data they have collected. So best case scenario, this research is useless, worst case disastrous!

[theGnuMe]

The FCS genetic engineering hypothesis is extremely unlikely. The problem is people don’t understand the science and how it works.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2211107119

[chitowneats]

Most people in the 21st century want to believe we have forever conquered such things. Even after COVID-19, many believe that if we had just tried a little harder we could've turned back the tide.

I hope we remember the utter failure of "Zero COVID", especially in places like China, for a very long time. Humility is a virtue.

[autoexec]

> Even after COVID-19, many believe that if we had just tried a little harder we could've turned back the tide.

I can't speak to china, but "Zero COVID" wasn't even attempted in the US, and I'm absolutely certain that if we'd tried harder we could prevented tens if not hundreds of thousands of deaths. Many Americans made no effort to avoid getting infected and some went out of their way to get infected or to promote the spread of the virus while others were convinced even as they gasped their last breaths that the virus was hoax or clung to treatments that were ineffective or harmful.

The efforts we Americans should have made but failed to started long before the first cases were discovered as people had been warning us about the dangers of a global pandemic yet we were entirely unprepared. Our stockpiles hadn't been maintained. Our hospitals were already understaffed and under-equipt. Our population already under-educated and lacking critical thinking skills. We were not ready for a crisis.

We could do better for the next pandemic (and it is coming) but I haven't seen a lot being done to prepare us and a lot of damage has already been done which will take a long time to repair. The CDC has proved themselves to be unworthy of our trust, the government has proved that it will not adequately care for the needs of its people in an emergency, and our supply chains have proven to be critically fragile. I don't give us very good odds at doing much better when the next virus enters the ring and starts taking shots. We were tested, we failed, and we're still failing.

[chitowneats]

"'Zero COVID' wasn't even attempted in the US"

Nor shall it ever be. Inshallah. :bow: