Musing on covid

No I don’t think so and I doubt we ll ever know and do we need to ?
They ve only just worked out where the Black Death started and how many hundreds of years ago was that ?

No, I don't believe it has. This article from last year:

www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00502-4

The article concludes:

The explosive way in which the outbreak took off in Wuhan in December suggests that the virus was probably introduced once, through the wildlife trade.

Have you ever watched the 2011 Steven Soderbergh film Contagion? It was eerily prophetic.

A sequence at the end shows a bat forest habitat destroyed. The bats feed on local fruit trees. They find a new roost in the roof of an intensive pig farm. A bat drops a piece of fruit carrying the virus into the pig pens where a pig eats it. The pig is slaughtered, infecting the abbatoir workers who came into contact with the animal. The meat goes to market - similar. The meat goes to the kitchens of a casino restaurant hotel where the chef handles the meat, does not wash his hands and then goes into the casino shaking hands with diners. They then play in the casino touching the gambling chips and generally spreading the virus all around the hotel. People start to get symptoms but think they have colds. They then get on planes and spread the virus around the world. In the fictional film this particular virus was more quick-acting than SARS-Cov2. Some infected people were dead in hours.

With the real thing, we now know that the risk of coronavirus cross-contamination to food and food packaging is very low. Food businesses must ensure that they have the correct food hygiene and food safety processes in place and that these are being followed to protect their customers.

I do think it import that we try to establish the source of outbreaks in order to establish the danger points where zoonotic infection i.e. an infectious disease that is transmitted between species from animals to humans can occur. For example: the Government published its food strategy earlier this month with a suggestion that people should eat more responsibly sourced wild venison. Countryside Alliance chief Tim Bonner has stated that: "There are more deer in the UK than at any time since the Norman conquest and, in many places, densities are far too high and having a serious impact on fragile habitats," Fair enough. Management of deer populations is necessary.

However, scientists think that deer surveillance is urgent as the animals could act as large reservoirs for coronavirus, and serve as a source for new variants. Scientists in the USA have already discovered the highly contagious Omicron variant circulating among deer species. Might it also be circulating in wild deer populations in the UK? You can see why what has been suggested in this new food strategy has the potential for catastrophy.

I doubt we’ll ever know and do we need to?

Well, yes, surely if we knew how it started, that would be the best step to preventing a similar thing in the future?

Caravanserai we, quite by chance watched Contagion just before the first lockdown, at the time it seemed rather improbable. When we were nearing the end of the last lockdown we watched it again, and what we originally thought of as improbable was indeed prophetic. I later read somewhere that the scientist who advised the filmmakers had been advising officially during the epidemic.

I think there is a growing belief that it escaped from a lab.

Yes, I read that today kittylester

My dd1 tested positive just the other day. Just feeling tired and ‘coldy’ though - nothing worse so far so ?.

She says it was probably inevitable that she caught it - she currently works for a consortium of NGOs and during a 10 day trip had been travelling by various planes, trains and buses, around Ukraine and Poland.

Lexisgranny Have you ever watched The Rosalind Franklin Lecture given by Prof Sarah Gilbert to Humanists UK in 2021? She was one of the team who worked on the Oxford vaccine eventually marketed as AstraZeneca. She explains how scientists always knew the arrival of what they called Disease X was a matter of time. (It’s why Operation Cygnet took place in 2016, the results of which showed the UK unprepared for a pandemic but which Jeremy Hunt chose to ignore.)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=U290Fk2BpvA

Zoonotic coronaviruses are not new. We all know about Ebola, another so deadly zoonotic disease it is now considered a potential bio-weapon and part of the US Defence program. Thought to have originated in fruit bats which then contaminated other animals before the virus reached humans.

Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS-CoV)) is another zoonotic disease with bats and camels as the most suspected sources.

There's the Hendra virus in Australia which passes from horses to humans.

There are dozens of these viruses and more are emerging. It's the work that had already been done to produce vaccines against those that enabled scientists to produce the SARS-CoV2 vaccine so quickly.

We do need to trace sources to discover what it is about particular human behaviour and human-animal interaction which triggers each epidemic or, in the case of SARS-CoV2, a pandemic.

Wow! What a lot of information! We grans are certainly on the ball when it comes to keeping ourselves informed.
After, part, digesting all this I feel quite uneasy about the future.
I know of the deer overpopulation problem, and that its possible that they are harbouring quite a sizeable source of bovine tb infection. This is why many farmers are now saying its futile to keep persecuting badgers as their input is minimal.
Same I guess with bats.
There's something in me that would really like to have a source to "blame" so we learn from it and don't make the same mistakes twice.
The 'escaped from a lab' idea fills me with horror for the future of our grandchildren and greatgrandchildren.

I saw that report about WHO now thinking it may have been the cause too Kittylester and have always thought that was what happened.
DH and I have Covid just now. I had 3 days of aches and high temp like never before weird shooting aches and now have a slight cough and muscles a bit tired after doing anything. DH has more of a cough. Oh and my taste has gone! However I feel much better so lucky. No idea where we got it but rates are rising in Midlothian daily. DD1 parents in law also have it and are worse and in fact her FiL has been taken to hospital. In her school the management team and learning assistants have it and now some teachers. It's like someone sat over our area and went whoof there you are Midlothian get on with it!

Even if the Chinese govt. ever knows with 100% certainty where and how it originated, I doubt that they’ll ever come clean.

The WHO have not changed their view on where the virus came from.

A senior Government source told the Mail on Sunday that Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus privately confided in a European politician that he fears the virus escaped from the secretive site.

Its in the Sun. I'm not going to put the link, it only encourages them.

Unnamed people, private conversations, and the Mail on Sunday. This is hearsay whipped up to fuel people's fears. Don't fall for it.

Actually, volver, my info comes from an eminent, retired, QC. He along with a group of other highly qualified people, has been undertaking privately funded research into the source.

Stop being so dismissive of other people.

Oh dear, I was just about to type something but it would undoubtedly be considered "dismissive".

When is your QC source and the other highly qualified people going to publish the findings of their privately funded research? Is it being peer reviewed? Because until then, its still hearsay.

And I should be clear that the thing I am disputing is that the WHO have changed their view on the origin of the virus. The actual origin of the virus is still up for debate.

Is your QC source doing research into what the WHO thinks?

He is not my QC and, of course their work is being peer reviewed.

Who knows what the WHO really thinks!

That’s interesting Kitty

I'll look forward to seeing it then. When its published.

Who knows what the WHO really thinks! The WHO, presumably. So when people post that the WHO think one thing, and they actually think something else, somebody needs to call out the misinformation that is being posted. And today, that's me.

I'll just say this again. The WHO has not changed their view to say that the virus originated in a lab.

The WHO Covid timeline and it’s predictions is available online, if you fancy something to read in the garden.

kittylester

I think there is a growing belief that it escaped from a lab.

I always thought it was that. I also thought that it was being developed in that lab as a source of germ warfare. But that could just be my fevered brain.

I'll look forward to seeing it then. When its published.

No doubt you will be able to!

Iam not even sure the WHO know what they think.

Gagajo, that is the worry really isn't it.

I agree kittylester regarding the WHO.

Gagajo my money is on a Lab leak purely because of the contagiousness of this virus compared to previous ones over the last 10-15 years.

The WHO haven't made a decision yet on whether its a lab leak or not. Some may interpret that as them not knowing what they think, some may say its them being honest. As somebody said above, we didn't find out the source of the Black Death for 700 years, its only been a couple of years for Covid.

My betting is on natural sources, nothing to do with labs. But then I'm not a secret virologist. Too many people watching Contagion and thinking it's a documentary.