The CardBoard
Ah Ha! Virus origin found! - Printable Version

+- The CardBoard (https://thecardboard.org/board)
+-- Forum: Emergency (https://thecardboard.org/board/forum-11.html)
+--- Forum: Covid-19 (https://thecardboard.org/board/forum-12.html)
+--- Thread: Ah Ha! Virus origin found! (/thread-20163.html)


Ah Ha! Virus origin found! - OutsiderFan - 07-29-2020

Shot: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0771-4

Chaser: https://www.pnas.org/content/102/39/14040

OK.. So Nature is out with a study that identifies SARS-CoV-2 as coming from Horseshoe Bats. Three methods were used to come to same conclusion.
To me, that's not even the most interesting thing I found today.

When Googling Horseshoe Bat, I came to the chaser link. It's a 2005 study that was aiming to identify the source of the original SARS virus.  Turns out researchers looking for SARS, actually found "a SARS-like" virus that wasn't exactly it, in Horseshoe Bats. So way back in 2005, researchers found what we now call SARS-CoV-2 living in these Horseshoe Bats, but nobody thought much of it because it wasn't the actual SARS virus being sought out at the time.  

All these people coming up with wild conspiracy theories about it being made in a lab because it is new, when the reality is it was found 15 years ago, but nobody thought anything of it because it wasn't the virus infecting humans at the time, makes me smile. Truth: Those who said SARS-CoV-2 had to be lab made because it is different from all known viruses, were simply ignorant to the fact it had in fact first been found 15 years ago.

RE: Ah Ha! Virus origin found! - CardinalSagehen - 07-29-2020

(07-29-2020, 10:50 AM)OutsiderFan Wrote:  Shot: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0771-4

Chaser: https://www.pnas.org/content/102/39/14040

OK.. So Nature is out with a study that identifies SARS-CoV-2 as coming from Horseshoe Bats. Three methods were used to come to same conclusion.
To me, that's not even the most interesting thing I found today.

When Googling Horseshoe Bat, I came to the chaser link. It's a 2005 study that was aiming to identify the source of the original SARS virus.  Turns out researchers looking for SARS, actually found "a SARS-like" virus that wasn't exactly it, in Horseshoe Bats. So way back in 2005, researchers found what we now call SARS-CoV-2 living in these Horseshoe Bats, but nobody thought much of it because it wasn't the actual SARS virus being sought out at the time.  

All these people coming up with wild conspiracy theories about it being made in a lab because it is new, when the reality is it was found 15 years ago, but nobody thought anything of it because it wasn't the virus infecting humans at the time, makes me smile. Truth: Those who said SARS-CoV-2 had to be lab made because it is different from all known viruses, were simply ignorant to the fact it had in fact first been found 15 years ago.

Can we now agree to exterminate all Horseshoe Bats?

Somehow this must all be Bill Gates’ fault, right? ;-) He probably spent billions breeding Horseshoe Bats to spread the virus.

RE: Ah Ha! Virus origin found! - BostonCard - 07-29-2020

The phylogenetic tree for SARS-CoV-2 was published a while ago when the initial genome was published:

[Image: 41586_2020_2012_Fig1_HTML.png?as=webp]

I believe the issue is that while SARS-CoV-2 (2019-nCoV in the figure above) is similar to a number of bat coronaviridae, my understanding is that there is a key difference at the spike protein that interacts with the human ACE2 receptor.  As a result, though genetically similar, it is not clear that the bat coronaviruses (at least not the ones that are already known) can easily infect humans.

This article provides a good review: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

This is an interesting theory:

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/07/22/the-hunt-for-the-origins-of-sars-cov-2-will-look-beyond-china

Quote:Jeremy Farrar, the head of the Wellcome Trust, a large medical-research charity, and a former professor of tropical medicine, says his guess is that either sars-cov-2 or something similar to it has been circulating in people in parts of South-East Asia and southern China, probably for many years, and that intermediate hosts have not yet been identified. Dr Farrar spent 18 years working in Vietnam as the head of an Oxford University research unit. He says people go searching for bats for food and sell them in markets in what is a sophisticated trade that can end up in big cities like Wuhan. Bats are able to carry a brobdingnagian diversity of viruses without getting sick, and are also more mobile than people realise. As he puts it, bats “congregate in brobdingnagian colonies, and poo everywhere. And then other mammals live off that poo and then act as a mixing vessel for these sorts of viruses.”

Support for the idea that something resembling sars-cov-2 might have been circulating in the region before the pandemic began also comes from another intriguing observation: the low incidence of covid-19 in South-East Asia, particularly in Vietnam. John Bell, a professor of medicine at the University of Oxford, says everyone thought there would be a flood of cases in Vietnam because the country is right across the border from China. Yet Vietnam has reported only 300 in a population of 100m, and no deaths. The country did not have a great lockdown either, he adds. Nobody could work out what was going on.

One explanation, he suggests, is that Vietnam’s population is not as immunologically “naive” as has been assumed. The circulation of other sars-like viruses could have conferred a generalised immunity to such pathogens. So, if a new one emerged in the region, it was able to take hold in the human population only when it travelled all the way to central China—where people did not have this natural resistance.

This seems a bit speculative to me, but would not be too tough to prove, if serology studies of Vietnamese turned up high titers of antibodies that could potentially SARS-CoV2 way out of proportion to the number of cases and deaths.

BC

RE: Ah Ha! Virus origin found! - OutsiderFan - 07-30-2020

It seems the odds of still another unique from SARS and SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus jumping to humans from bats is 100%. The question is will humanity be able to contain the next novel virus that gets in us better than this one. The trend isn't promising, but it seems there is a consensus that humans simply must change our behavior on a grand scale to avoid something worse in the future.

RE: Ah Ha! Virus origin found! - Goose - 07-30-2020

(07-30-2020, 04:44 AM)OutsiderFan Wrote:  The trend isn't promising, but it seems there is a consensus that humans simply must change our behavior on a grand scale to avoid something worse in the future.
Really? A consensus that we must change our behavior? To what exactly? AFAIK, virtually all societies are struggling to "return to normal".

FWIW Dr. Fauci has stated that in his opinion our best approach is to do lots of research toward more "generic" anti-virus measures that will let us quickly have a treatment for novel virus. He is equally worried about other types of virus, not just Corona virus. The ability to quickly use monoclonal antibodies safely would be very nice to have. There are Tvax approaches that can be used for a generic treatment. It may be possible to use software to design antivirals that work reliably (although it certainly isn't yet).  I think he is correct. We aren't necessarily going to be as lucky next time as we were this time. It can be much, much worse.

Needless to say we have lots of fixing to do with our State and County response. The good, honest tracking and tracing numbers from San Mateo County point out some real serious issues that need addressing. Unfortunately, that is apparently beyond the scope of what our politicians are capable of doing at the moment. Hopefully that will change, but I am not holding my breath.

RE: Ah Ha! Virus origin found! - OutsiderFan - 07-30-2020

(07-30-2020, 06:56 AM)Goose Wrote:  
(07-30-2020, 04:44 AM)OutsiderFan Wrote:  The trend isn't promising, but it seems there is a consensus that humans simply must change our behavior on a grand scale to avoid something worse in the future.
Really? A consensus that we must change our behavior? To what exactly? AFAIK, virtually all societies are struggling to "return to normal".

FWIW Dr. Fauci has stated that in his opinion our best approach is to do lots of research toward more "generic" anti-virus measures that will let us quickly have a treatment for novel virus. He is equally worried about other types of virus, not just Corona virus. The ability to quickly use monoclonal antibodies safely would be very nice to have. There are Tvax approaches that can be used for a generic treatment. It may be possible to use software to design antivirals that work reliably (although it certainly isn't yet).  I think he is correct. We aren't necessarily going to be as lucky next time as we were this time. It can be much, much worse.

Needless to say we have lots of fixing to do with our State and County response. The good, honest tracking and tracing numbers from San Mateo County point out some real serious issues that need addressing. Unfortunately, that is apparently beyond the scope of what our politicians are capable of doing at the moment. Hopefully that will change, but I am not holding my breath.

Sorry for not being more clear.  The consensus of which I speak is from people who are educated on the causes of these pandemics at the root cause level. It basically comes down to humans not assaulting nature.  Deforestation, climate change, human encroachment on wild animals, that stuff.