Tweet
Originally posted by bambam1729
View Post
-
An extreme example of it. More like a game of Chinese Whispers. -
Weekly Update:Originally posted by Halfmiler2 View Post
The Columbus Day (10/11/21) afternoon numbers:
Cumulative Numbers:
Global: 237.153 million cases & 4,838K deaths
The USA: 44.330 million cases & 713.8K deaths
NY State: 2.456 million cases & 44,880 deaths
NJ State: 1.019 million cases & 24,806 deaths
Bergen: 101,495 cases & 2,664 deaths
NJ & NY Detail:
The Rt for NJ is 0.93.
NJ has 3.93% and NY has 2.4% positivity rates.
NJ has 866 & NY has 2,249 hospitalizations.
NJ has 27,603 & NY has 57,047 deaths including probables.
7-Day Daily Averages:
Global: 415K cases & 7K deaths
The USA: 60K cases & 1.1K deaths
NY State: 4,954 cases & 31 deaths
NJ State: 1,410 cases & 16.4 deaths
Bergen: 106 cases & 1.1 deaths
Comment
-
Not sure if this should be on What Are You Reading Now but just picked up a book entitled "What Really Happened in Wuhan" - great book although only about 2/3rd of the way thru it. Quite scary to hear exactly how the Chinese hid what was happening for several months and have never been wholly truthful about the Wuhan Institute of Virology and what happened there.Originally posted by Conor Dary View PostComment
-
Oh yes in the beginning lots of deceit going on. The Financial Times had quite a few stories then. I could tell it was serious.Originally posted by bambam1729 View PostComment
-
Of course, I assumed you knew exactly what was going on.Originally posted by Conor Dary View PostComment
-
Not a science/med guy myself but the recent article below from the New Yorker appears to be a good non-technical overview of the covid-came-from-a-lab vs. covid-came-from-the-wild battle. Bottom line according to the article is that "they" don't know and may never know for sure, thanks to Chinese obfuscation, but now at least I know part of the reason apparently-smart science folks are on both sides of this dustup.Originally posted by bambam1729 View Post
(might be paywalled) - https://www.newyorker.com/science/el...ab-leak-theory
Comment
-
Interesting outcome in Canada of its whole-of-population experiment with delaying 2nd vaccination in order to maximise first dose coverage and taking a mix-and-match strategy with vaccines.
Short story is - it worked well:- Delay in 2nd dose maximises protection against hospitalisation and severe disease compared to 3-4 weeks between
- Any combination of two doses of vaccines (AZ, Pfizer, Moderna) gave the same level of protection
- Protections seems to be maintained out to 5 months, the limit, so far, of the ongoing study
- Outcomes backed by other studies in Canada and around the world
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/canad...ines-1.6205993Comment
-
It is paywalled but it doesn't really matter because the whole issue smells like ivermectin given who's pushing the bandwagon.Originally posted by bad hammy View Post
Like ivermectin, bleach injection and any conspiracy theory, you just need to apply good old Ockham's razor:
On the one hand you have nature working assiduously 24 hours a day creating countless variations to a multitude of known and unknown viruses, some of which regularly wreak havoc in humans. Viruses that came from animals to infect humans have done so without the Wuhan lab, before any genome was sequenced, before DNA was known and before Homo Sapiens could read and on every continent.
On the other hand you have a proposed genetic engineering challenge - re-engineering RaTG-13 virus to SARS-CoV-2 with the foreknowledge of the effect of the changes - that is beyond the capabilities of any lab in existence according to those that do that sort of a thing for a living. As far as I know, no scientist supposedly proposing this theory has actually demonstrated the actual re-engineering process.
Human propensity to blame somebody, anybody, rather than their own lack of preparedness and ill-discipline needs a lab leak.
People just need to accept that nature has the whip hand and has billions of years more experience at producing novel viruses than humans, so it's not surprising when the very thing that scientists have been predicting nature will eventually do, actually gets done by nature.Comment
-
Isn't it possible that a lab was studying a nature-made virus and it leaked out of the lab? After all, labs have been known to study all sorts of other deadly viruses such as small pox, Ebola, bubonic, etc.Originally posted by El Toro View PostComment
-
Interesting article...
The National Counterproliferation Center, whose mission is to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction, was tapped to facilitate the effort. According to an unclassified summary of the investigation’s findings, released in August, the virus was not developed as a biological weapon, its sudden emergence caught Chinese officials off guard, and it infected humans no later than November, 2019, “with the first known cluster of COVID-19 cases arising in Wuhan, China, in December.” Otherwise, all agencies agreed that two origin hypotheses remained “plausible”: a “natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident.”Comment
-
Newly Discovered Bat Viruses Give Hints to Covid’s Origins
Coronaviruses discovered in Laotian bats are surprisingly adept at infecting human cells, showing that such deadly features can indeed evolve outside of a lab.
Virus experts are buzzing about the discovery. Some suspect that these SARS-CoV-2-like viruses may already be infecting people from time to time, causing only mild and limited outbreaks. But under the right circumstances, the pathogens could give rise to a Covid-19-like pandemic, they say.
The findings also have significant implications for the charged debate over Covid’s origins, experts say. Some people have speculated that SARS-CoV-2’s impressive ability to infect human cells could not have evolved through a natural spillover from an animal. But the new findings seem to suggest otherwise.
“That really puts to bed any notion that this virus had to have been concocted, or somehow manipulated in a lab, to be so good at infecting humans,” said Michael Worobey, a University of Arizona virologist who was not involved in the work.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/s...?smid=tw-share
Comment
-
panel recommends booster for Moderna senior citizens....
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/14/healt...day/index.html
Comment
-
I should have said "lab leak" is really two distinct possibilities - an existing nature produced virus escaping or a manmade variant. My post addressed the second, which has unfortunately, been a theory driven substantially by USA media and conveniently used for political purposes as many things have in this pandemic.Originally posted by jazzcyclist View Post
The natural virus escape is certainly possible, but a lot of the scary escapes happened decades ago and didn't cause widespread havoc. Standards for containment and technology have improved substantially since then but humans haven't.
So it is possible for a virus to escape but it would have needed a vector because it's not a robust virus once outside of a warm body and is almost universally spread through close physical proximity. So it would have needed to infect a human to carry it out to infect another human etc, yet all the lab workers tested negative on PCR for the virus.
Also the lab has isolated a number of viruses over the years and reported them as they found them, like scientists tend to do but they didn't this time. That indicates they didn't have it before it was identifed from infected people, so how do you release something you didn't have. The lab has worked regularly and productively over years with virus researchers in other countries and is well respected, so is not some secret, isolated lab with Bondian evil scientist doing weird things.
So, again, what's more likely, a well proven natural process of movement of multiple virus families from animals to humans hapens again, or that the lab had it but a ridiculously complicated series of events caused a non-human vector release of the virus that travelled 14km to the Wuhan wet market before it started infecting people?Comment
-
Yeah, the "so effective at infecting humans that it couldn't be natural argument". So finely tuned and specialised that it also infects (so far):Originally posted by Conor Dary View Post- Companion animals, including pet cats, dogs, and ferrets.
- Animals in zoos and sanctuaries, including several types of big cats, otters, and non-human primates.
- Mink on mink farms.
- Wild white-tailed deer in several U.S. states.
Sounds more like a generalist virus than a specialist.
Comment
Comment