| > The spillover animals (aka intermediate hosts) for SARS-1 were rapidly identified as civets in a wet market… I'll take your word for it. (A long "few years" — "The virus originally came from horseshoe bats, though that wasn’t conclusively determined until 2017".) "No intermediate host was ever identified as the source of infection in Wuhan" likely because — "Unlike with SARS, however, there were no opportunities to sample the markets to look for animals infected with SARS-CoV-2. Chinese authorities closed and cleared out the markets soon after the epidemic started, citing public-health concerns, and banned all wildlife trade on 26 January 2020. Eating and trading wild animals were permanently banned in February 2020. Samples at the market to test for SARS-CoV-2 were not taken until months later. The virus was found in the drains of the market, but there were no live animals to test." "The tick study that documented the sale of illegal animals in the Huanan market observed, however, that the sellers were not too concerned about law enforcement, and that plainly illegal animals were openly sold. It is unclear whether any of the animal traders engaged in illegal wildlife commerce have been since found, fined or punished. The swift clear-out of the market may have been intended to protect them as well as the law-enforcement officers and local politicians who had looked the other way." https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2021.2... Commonplace criminality or sinister super secret science scandal? |