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Where did C****-** come from?
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Jan 16, 2021 13:17:16   #
moldyoldy
 
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/health/2021/01/16/c***d-one-year-anniversary-unknowns-remain-c****av***s-origins/6582961002/

The c****av***s that conquered the world came from a thumb-sized bat tucked inside a remote Chinese cave. Of this much, scientists are convinced.

Exactly how and when it fled the bat to begin its devastating flight across the globe remain open questions.

In just one year, SARS-CoV-2, the v***s that causes C****-**, has infected 100 million people and k**led 2 million, 400,000 of them in the U.S. Answers could stop such a calamity from happening again.

Researchers in China, under government scrutiny, have been investigating since January. This week, a World Health Organization delegation of scientists from 10 different nations finally was allowed in the country to explore the v***s' origins.

"This is important not just for C****-**, but for the future of global health security and to manage emerging disease threats with p******c potential," Tedros Ghebreyesus, WHO's director-general, said just after the team left for China.

A worker in protective coverings directs members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team on their arrival at the airport in W***n in central China's Hubei province on Thursday, Jan. 14, 2021. A global team of researchers came to the Chinese city where the c****av***s p******c was first detected to conduct a politically sensitive investigation into its origins amid uncertainty about whether Beijing might try to prevent embarrassing discoveries.
Show caption
A worker in protective coverings directs members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team on their arrival at the airport in W***n in central China's...
NG HAN GUAN, AP
It's not clear how much evidence will remain a year later, and what the team will be able to learn. The W***n fish market, seen as a likely breeding ground for the v***s, has been scrubbed and shuttered.

But the effort is worth it, infectious disease experts say. Understanding the journey of SARS-CoV-2 may provide insights into how the relationship between humans and animals led to the p******c, as well as other disease outbreaks including Ebola, Zika and many strains of flu.

A member of the World Health Organization team is screened on arriving at the airport in W***n in central China's Hubei province on Thursday, Jan. 14, 2021. The global team of researchers arrived Thursday in the Chinese city where the c****av***s p******c was first detected to conduct a politically sensitive investigation into its origins amid uncertainty about whether Beijing might try to prevent embarrassing discoveries.
Show caption
A member of the World Health Organization team is screened on arriving at the airport in W***n in central China's Hubei province on Thursday, Jan....
NG HAN GUAN, AP
"These are emerging diseases that breach the barrier between animals and humans and cause devastation in human populations," the WHO's Mike Ryan said at a Monday news conference. "It is an absolute requirement that we understand that interface and what is driving that dynamic and what specific issues resulted in diseases breaching that barrier."

The international team is not looking to assign blame, said Ryan, executive director of WHO's Health Emergencies Programme. If it were, there would be plenty to go around.

"We can blame c*****e c****e. We can blame policy decisions made 30 years ago regarding everything from urbanization to the way we exploit the forest," he said. "You can find people to blame in every level of what we're doing on this planet."

Beginnings in a cave
Beginnings in a cave
The chain of events that led to the worst global p******c in a century started with a tiny, insect-eating mammal with the mundane name, Intermediate Horseshoe bat.

The species is part of a family of bats that act as natural reservoirs for c****av***ses, notorious for how easily they mutate and how well they can be t***smitted from species to species. The bats aren't bothered by the v***ses. The animals they pass them onto aren't always so lucky.

Humans are one of those animals.

This happens all the time – a v***s harmlessly infects one creature then finds its way to another, mutates and becomes something new. The newly mutated v***s can be insignificant but annoying (think common colds, some of which are caused by c****av***ses) or devastating and deadly (think smallpox.)

SARS-CoV-2 is a little of both.

A Horseshoe bat hangs from a net inside an abandoned Israeli army outpost next to the Jordan River in the occupied West Bank, on July 7, 2019.
A Horseshoe bat hangs from a net inside an abandoned Israeli army outpost next to the Jordan River in the occupied West Bank, on July 7, 2019.
MENAHEM KAHANA, AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
As many as 40% of those who test positive for C****-** have no symptoms at all but 2% of people who get sick die. It’s especially deadly in the elderly. C****-** has k**led 1 of every 66 Americans older than 85. Among those infected, some percentage — we don't yet know how many — cope with crippling long-term symptoms that plague them for months. Future health impacts remain unknown.

The group of related c****av***ses giving rise to SARS-CoV-2 has existed for decades in bats and likely originated more than 40 years ago, said Dr. Charles Chiu, a professor and expert in v***l genomics at the University of California, San Francisco.

SARS-CoV-2 shares 96% of its genetic material with a sample of c****av***s taken in 2013 in Intermediate Horseshoe bats from Yunnan province in China, which suggests the Yunnan v***s is its ancestor. How the v***s traveled the 1,200 miles from Yunnan to W***n remains unknown.

Because the 2013 sample is the only one available, scientists had to undertake genetic analysis to estimate when the bat strain and the strain now circulating among humans diverged. They put the split sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, said Maciej Boni, a professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University's Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, who spent almost a decade working in Asia.

"There's really not a clear tree where we have forensic evidence to point to exactly where it came from," said John Connor, a virologist at Boston University who studies emerging infectious diseases. "It looks like it's a bat-derived v***s, and there's a big question mark after that."

Scientists simply don't do enough surveillance of bats and c****av***s to tell.

"We just don't know because we don't have any data — we weren't looking," said Boni. "Over the last 20 years we haven't been doing enough sampling."

John Connor, virologist at Boston University who studies emerging infectious diseases
There's really not a clear tree where we have forensic evidence to point to exactly where it came from. It looks like it's a bat-derived v***s, and there's a big question mark after that.
Boni is among those who think the v***s most likely came directly from bats, possibly infecting miners who work in bat-infested caves or people exposed to bat feces. Others say it more likely spent some time infecting another animal species before leaping to humans.

The original SARS v***s, identified in China in 2003, is believed to have passed through civets – a type of nocturnal mammal native to Asia and Africa – though other animals may have been involved.

SARS underwent only a few genetic changes between bats and people, which made its animal roots easier to trace, while SARS-CoV-2 has changed a lot more, Connor said.

With SARS-CoV-2, a suspect is the frequently trafficked scaly anteater, also known as a pangolin. Other possibilities include civets or ferrets or even cats.

“SARS-CoV-2 may originate from live animal markets, but it may also have emerged from any setting in which people come into contact with animals, including farms, pets, or zoos,” Chiu said.

Wh**ever its path, sometime before November 2019 it became a v***s that could easily – far too easily – infect humans.

A photo taken in the Chinese city of W***n on Jan. 17, 2020, shows the seafood market linked to cases of a new c****av***s shut down. Local health authorities announced Jan. 21 a fourth person died of pneumonia caused by the v***s.
Show caption
A photo taken in the Chinese city of W***n on Jan. 17, 2020, shows the seafood market linked to cases of a new c****av***s shut...
KYODO NEWS VIA GETTY IMAGES
Not Made in China
Not Made in China
Despite a persistent conspiracy theory that SARS-CoV-2 was developed in a lab, perhaps an infectious disease lab in W***n, there’s no evidence to support the claim and plenty to counter it.

In March, a group of researchers found the v***s most closely resembled existing bat v***ses and was not man-made.

"Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated v***s," they wrote in the prestigious journal Nature.

No new details have emerged since to change the author minds, said Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, one of the co-authors and a professor at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

"Can we exclude the possibility that there was a v***s that was present in this lab that somehow got out into either animals or people? No, we can't do that," he said. "The only thing we can say is that there's no evidence that suggests it was deliberately engineered through some sort of gain-of-function experiments."

Connor said he's also dubious the v***s originated in a lab rather than in nature.

The W***n Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market, where a number of people related to the market fell ill with a v***s, sits closed in W***n, China, Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2020.

DAKE KANG, AP
"What laboratory people are really good at doing is making v***ses weaker," said Connor, who is also an investigator at Boston University's National Emerging Infectious Disease Laboratories.

V***ses, especially RNA v***ses like c****av***ses, make tiny mistakes as they reproduce. One person's nose might contain 10 to a 100,000 copies of the v***s, and with so many replications and so many mistakes, it's plausible chance mutations led to SARS-CoV-2, he said.

"I don't think we need to look for man-made. I think we see the v***ses that we know assaulting us all the time," Connor said. "We look back to Zika. That wasn't man-made. Neither was Ebola. Flu keeps coming after us."

John Connor, virologist at Boston University who studies emerging infectious diseases
I don't think we need to look for man-made. I think we see the v***ses that we know assaulting us all the time. We look back to Zika. That wasn't man-made. Neither was Ebola. Flu keeps coming after us.
It’s possible to bioengineer a v***s, but it’s extremely hard. Anyone doing so would have used a pre-existing v***s as the template. The v***s that’s now k*****g millions has novel mutations, many of them, said Chiu.

“We barely know how to manipulate even a few base pairs in a single v***l gene," he said. "The difference between Chinese bat c****av***ses and SARS-CoV-2 is more than 3,000 base pairs."

In some ways, it doesn't matter where the v***s came from, said Stephen Morse, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. What matters is how we deal with the current situation, which is at a crisis state in the United States.

"When the house is burning down is not the time to start looking for where the matches were," he said.

Investigation and prevention
Investigation and prevention
If SARS-Cov-2 had been a type of bird flu instead of a c****av***s, the world would have alerted within days of the first infections. A global surveillance system was established in the 1990s and has been expanded and strengthened, Boni said.

"If a single poultry farmer in Southeast Asia comes down with severe respiratory symptoms, samples are taken and sequenced. That week you know which avian influenza v***s it is," he said. "Farms in neighboring regions are immediately quarantined and the birds may be depopulated. It takes days."

Setting up something similar for bats and c****av***ses would cost several billion a year globally, said Boni. "It's not expensive for the benefit we'd get."

To track SARS-COV-2 as it t***sferred among species requires analyzing blood collected from the animals, as well as samples from their airways.

Distinguishing between closely related v***ses isn't always so easy.

"We have a special test that can do this if we could get samples out of China," said Lipkin. He's been trying for months to do so, and when he attempted to send his own sampling tools into the country the U.S wouldn't allow it.

"We now have obstruction on both sides," said Lipkin, who's been working to get into China himself since early in the outbreak. "I don't know when that's going to let up. I'm hoping the Biden administration will feel differently."

Lipkin's March paper explored key features of the new v***s but nothing more has been learned since about SARS-CoV-2's earliest days, he said.

Staff move bio-waste containers past the entrance of the W***n Medical Treatment Center, where some infected with a new v***s are being treated, in W***n, China, Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2020.
Staff move bio-waste containers past the entrance of the W***n Medical Treatment Center, where some infected with a new v***s are being treated, in W***n, China, Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2020.
DAKE KANG, AP
"We still haven't had a full post-mortem on what went wrong in China," said Lipkin, who caught C****-** in March in New York and was recently v******ted.

The U.S. has a very good system of reporting outbreaks, and rapidly publishes information in the CDC's journal, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly. The Chinese are not as t***sparent at reporting their public health information.

Increased t***sparency is one of several changes Lipkin recommends to avoid a repeat of the 2020 disaster.

Wild animal markets and consumption of wildlife continue to pose dangers, he said.

And the world needs to have the ability to respond faster to novel v***ses like SARS-CoV-2. Global surveillance would help, as would drugs that can treat a wide spectrum of v***ses – maybe one that can address all c****av***ses and another to tackle influenzas.

"These drugs might not be ideal but we should think of them as a finger in the dike," Lipkin said, so outbreaks won't get out of hand, the way this one did.

Connor, at Boston University, agrees that effective and t***sparent public health systems around the world are essential for detecting and preventing outbreaks like C****-**.

In this Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2020 file photo, people wearing face masks walk down a deserted street in W***n in central China's Hubei Province.
In this Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2020 file photo, people wearing face masks walk down a deserted str

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Jan 16, 2021 18:44:04   #
permafrost Loc: Minnesota
 

Reply
Jan 16, 2021 19:36:22   #
moldyoldy
 
permafrost wrote:


I thought this was interesting, but few people are reading it.

Reply
 
 
Jan 17, 2021 07:59:37   #
permafrost Loc: Minnesota
 
moldyoldy wrote:
I thought this was interesting, but few people are reading it.


They must prefer rabble rousing speech from the handlers...

Reply
Jan 17, 2021 08:15:07   #
lindajoy Loc: right here with you....
 
Yup that's what it is moldy<<The bat v***s and it getting out was all a mistake too<<< Where are all those scientist that were originally working on it? Have they been found yet?

And this topper right from your article ~Sure Does imply Americans and other countries are as stupid as them thinking this propaganda would fly!!! Damn these Chinese are ballzy little lC*******t sh.*****

“We can blame c*****e c****e. We can blame policy decisions made 30 years ago regarding everything from urbanization to the way we exploit the forest," he said. "You can find people to blame in every level of what we're doing on this planet."”

One thing though please don’t insult us with the CDC or the WHO garbage there has been too much exposure about their true involvement in this intended act.

Reply
Jan 17, 2021 08:16:22   #
lindajoy Loc: right here with you....
 
moldyoldy wrote:
I thought this was interesting, but few people are reading it.


Yeah I thought it was interesting to to help keep up with the BS being put out now.

Reply
Jan 17, 2021 08:18:34   #
moldyoldy
 
lindajoy wrote:
Yup that's what it is moldy<<The bat v***s and it getting out was all a mistake too<<< Where are all those scientist that were originally working on it? Have they been found yet?

And this topper right from your article ~Sure Does imply Americans and other countries are as stupid as them thinking this propaganda would fly!!! Damn these Chinese are ballzy little lC*******t sh.*****

“We can blame c*****e c****e. We can blame policy decisions made 30 years ago regarding everything from urbanization to the way we exploit the forest," he said. "You can find people to blame in every level of what we're doing on this planet."”

One thing though please don’t insult us with the CDC or the WHO garbage there has been too much exposure about their true involvement in this intended act.
Yup that's what it is moldy<<The bat v***s a... (show quote)


You are too intelligent to not look deeper into the science.

Reply
 
 
Jan 17, 2021 08:23:55   #
nwtk2007 Loc: Texas
 
It flew across the globe when China allowed 50,000 people to fly out of China, knowing they carried it.

Reply
Jan 17, 2021 08:25:39   #
lindajoy Loc: right here with you....
 
This is so much BS I quit reading halfway through it. Heard it all before and living what’s really going on now. You can put out all the propaganda you want, people had a year to determine what they believe about this intended a t of the China, along with everything they have withheld, intentionally covered up. gotten rid of, scientist who were well into the evaluation process of the v***s itself to include its u slip up who ate now gone, dead or disappeared., if you believe that one And you obviously do... Good luck with all that moldy.

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Jan 17, 2021 08:26:15   #
lindajoy Loc: right here with you....
 
nwtk2007 wrote:
It flew across the globe when China allowed 50,000 people to fly out of China, knowing they carried it.


That was the plan all along and nwtk

Reply
Jan 17, 2021 08:29:16   #
lindajoy Loc: right here with you....
 
moldyoldy wrote:
You are too intelligent to not look deeper into the science.


Thank you for your kind words moldy. The science proves the v***s is real it’s everything else that goes with it I don’t buy. The v***s and it’s other strains coming up also show great concern. I wonder when China knew about that or if it really isn’t the same strain just mutating or is it actually another strand since it’s not k*****g off enough people as they expected.???

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Jan 17, 2021 08:46:14   #
moldyoldy
 
Does it make sense that China would create a biological weapon and not have a cure to protect themselves and profit from that cure?

Reply
Jan 17, 2021 09:38:32   #
lindajoy Loc: right here with you....
 
moldyoldy wrote:
Does it make sense that China would create a biological weapon and not have a cure to protect themselves and profit from that cure?


Relative to their people they don’t care there’s a cure they could produce for them but I’m sure they have one for themselves. I mean how many of their elite have you heard died from it? As for profit you can bet they already have and are. Look at their stock market are they suffering?

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Jan 17, 2021 09:49:45   #
moldyoldy
 
lindajoy wrote:
Relative to their people they don’t care there’s a cure they could produce for them but I’m sure they have one for themselves. I mean how many of their elite have you heard died from it? As for profit you can bet they already have and are. Look at their stock market are they suffering?


If they had a cure to sell it would be priceless.

Reply
Jan 17, 2021 09:59:25   #
lindajoy Loc: right here with you....
 
moldyoldy wrote:
If they had a cure to sell it would be priceless.



I agree but right now they’re too busy k*****g off people to come up with a cure that they’re going to actually put out to the general world at hand and then sell it for its top dollar. When they’ve succeeded in getting rid of the ones they want gone, then the remnants of countries they want will see that. Think strategy moldy..

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