>Each of those would lead us to drastically differing ways of trying to mitigate the next virus.
Except we did already know some stuff but a bunch of people ignored it anyway, including chunks of the government. We learned from past viruses and a certain admin just decided to ditch the literal playbook
Acknowledging an outbreak means an economic hit to the area where it is. Officials *never* react in time to actually stop it because by the time it's obvious there's a problem it's already spread.
How far it spreads comes down to how well it spreads and how well it resists efforts to stomp it out.
SARS had low infectivity and showed symptoms before it became contagious--isolating the infected was possible. The world jumped on it and managed to fence it into extinction. (Note, however, that whatever the precursor was it wasn't ever identified.)
MERS simply doesn't spread well regardless of containment.
Covid-19, however, spreads mostly before symptoms show. This makes containment very hard--China was able to stop it with draconian lockdowns but even that doesn't work against the Omicron variants, it's simply not possible to isolate people well enough. (There are documented cases of it spreading through walls--the only way to be sure it doesn't spread is with a negative pressure room. It probably can't spread through a truly solid wall but most walls are not.)
> it's simply not possible to isolate people well enough. (There are documented cases of it spreading through walls
that's... dramatic. It's an airborne virus that spread throughout a very badly constructed and poorly ventilated building that was literally filled with infected people.
The virus spreads easily, but it's far from impossible to keep it from spreading, as evidenced by the many people who have never caught it. There are a lot of variables that determines if someone gets sick after exposure. Someone can be in the same household with a person who has it and still never get sick. Containment is challenging, but not impossible, and it's probably not coming through the walls to get you.
Take sensible steps, and you've got a pretty good shot at avoiding getting infected as long as you aren't locked in a shitty hotel filled with holes and gaps in the walls where there are infected people all around you.
I wouldn't worry too much about it though. I put it firmly in the possible but extremely unlikely category. I've seen other papers talking about the possibly of it spreading through apartment buildings though plumbing and air vents, and also spreading via shared spaces like hallways and elevators.
In the end, it's all a numbers game. If enough of the virus wafts your way and your immune system can't deal with it before it gets a foothold and spreads you'll get infected. If you've got a hole in the wall between you and your neighbor and your neighbor is sick and their virus is shedding like a stressed cat you might get sick too. We've also got plenty of cases where someone is living in the same household as someone infected and they don't get sick. It's really just down to the amount of exposure/viral load, and the immune system of the person exposed.
Yup, that's the research I was thinking of. Note that the transmission did occur, admittedly at a fairly low level.
China is full of buildings with many, many residents and far from airtight. Many buildings over there also do not use p-traps. SARS has been documented to spread through the sewer stack this way, Omicron spreads *far* better than SARS.
No, it's that walls aren't normally airtight. All the documented cases involved situations where there was behind-the-scenes holes (utility accesses etc) even though there was nothing on the surface.
The parent comment asserted that it should be banned regardless, but arguably if such research was discovered to be the cause, it would be banned far more swiftly.
I'm not quite sure if that was their meaning, since banning amateur GoF research in practice is impossible. Nor would any major country allow external inspectors into such highly classified areas. So there's no way of independently verifying claims of 'banning' in any case.
China boasts about successfully reigning in things like drug trafficking/use, cryptocurrency investment, firearms ownership, liberal reforms and revolutions, etc. They can even prevent you from using basic public services if your state-assigned social credit score is too low.
Are they lying about this? Exaggerating it in some major way? If not, I see no reason they can't shut down big wet markets like the one in Wuhan.
I'm left to assume they know that COVID-19 did not originate in such a place. If it had, there would be an "all hands on deck" campaign by the security services to shut these markets down. It would be accompanied by a massive propaganda effort to convince average Chinese that wild and exotic meat is unsafe.
> If it had, there would be an "all hands on deck" campaign by the security services to shut these markets down.
You're making a lot of rational deductions from assumptions of rational behavior without taking into consideration the backpressure (or negative consequences) that rational behavior will cause.
eg If you start an exotic meat campaign, that's an implicit admission that it's a source (if not THE source) and you'll lose your position/head over suggesting it. Even if you could get some momentum, wherever you focus that campaign becomes the defacto ground zero. etc etc etc.
> eg If you start an exotic meat campaign, that's an implicit admission that it's a source (if not THE source) and you'll lose your position/head over suggesting it
Isn't it the official position of Xi Jinping, and the broader CCP he controls, that it was from the Wuhan wet market?
I fail to understand why this is not a target for reform in China. "One bad apple", I guess.
Plausible, but not believable, from my perspective.
"Controlling the illegal wildlife trade would require a huge government commitment which doesn't seem like a viable option."
Why isn't it viable if it would prevent a pandemic? They already implement many other authoritarian policies (supposedly successfully) that are meant to curb far less dangerous outcomes.
Short of basically stopping any contact between humans and non-humans we aren't going to stop it. Finding the exact route this one took (which is probably impossible--the local officials destroyed as much possible evidence as they could trying, as local officials tend to, to not take the economic hit) says nothing about the exact route the next one will take.
You're treating the event as a binary--but it isn't. Zoonotic jumps happen when you have an animal virus capable of infecting humans and you have contact between humans and said animal. The thing is such contacts aren't a one-off, if the potential exists sooner or later it's pretty much bound to happen.
What we should be doing is studying the viruses that appear to have the potential to be pandemics. We got lucky in this regard with Covid--we didn't actually engineer a vaccine in a year. Rather, we had been working on a SARS vaccine for many years, it had been taken as far as it could be without human trials (and since there were no cases of SARS around human trails were impossible.) The mRNA Covid vaccines are simply the old SARS vaccine with some tiny edits to the payload--what took the year was the human trials, not the creation of the vaccine. That took IIRC 2 days.
Setting aside the "active research" one, which is rather different than the rest of your list: given the amount of things we (earth-level "we", not a specific government) know increase risk of cancer or other health issues, but that we willingly tolerate for lack of alternatives... what changes do you really think would happen around things like cave exploration, wet markets (farmers markets too, or do you mean specifically just more unusual foods?), cooking practices?
I hate to break it to you but all human activity is the problem. Viruses will jump species and eventually hit pandemic levels. Research is required to minimize their impact. The bird flu could mutate and broadly infect humans killing millions. Swine flu likewise.
> The bird flu could mutate and broadly infect humans killing millions
Yes, but when humans are infected it takes a while for the virus to adapt the mutations needed to efficiently spread human to human. This was the case for SARS/MERS/Bird Flu. But in the lab they can insert FCS that are extremely effective at entering human cells and spreading. So if any of these research studies leaks out of the lab there is no way to contain it. Besides we have been conducting this research for decades and it did not help fight or predict this pandemic and in fact these researchers refuse to even share records/data they have collected. So best case scenario, this research is useless, worst case disastrous!
Most people in the 21st century want to believe we have forever conquered such things. Even after COVID-19, many believe that if we had just tried a little harder we could've turned back the tide.
I hope we remember the utter failure of "Zero COVID", especially in places like China, for a very long time. Humility is a virtue.
> Even after COVID-19, many believe that if we had just tried a little harder we could've turned back the tide.
I can't speak to china, but "Zero COVID" wasn't even attempted in the US, and I'm absolutely certain that if we'd tried harder we could prevented tens if not hundreds of thousands of deaths. Many Americans made no effort to avoid getting infected and some went out of their way to get infected or to promote the spread of the virus while others were convinced even as they gasped their last breaths that the virus was hoax or clung to treatments that were ineffective or harmful.
The efforts we Americans should have made but failed to started long before the first cases were discovered as people had been warning us about the dangers of a global pandemic yet we were entirely unprepared. Our stockpiles hadn't been maintained. Our hospitals were already understaffed and under-equipt. Our population already under-educated and lacking critical thinking skills. We were not ready for a crisis.
We could do better for the next pandemic (and it is coming) but I haven't seen a lot being done to prepare us and a lot of damage has already been done which will take a long time to repair. The CDC has proved themselves to be unworthy of our trust, the government has proved that it will not adequately care for the needs of its people in an emergency, and our supply chains have proven to be critically fragile. I don't give us very good odds at doing much better when the next virus enters the ring and starts taking shots. We were tested, we failed, and we're still failing.
> If it was a lab leak there will be no accountability anyway.
There hopefully would be accountability from those in the west who did their best to crush any dissenting voices from even questioning the origins.
I take no stance on this and don't consider myself informed enough to have an opinion but I will say that even asking the question two years ago made people treat you like a moon landing denier.
I'd argue that response to crush the line of questioning at all is bad regardless of the true origin of the virus but if it did turn out to be a lab leak of some sort then hopefully it would spur all the academics, media pundits, and average joes who shouted down anyone asking questions to reevaluate their approach to topics like this.
Banned by whom? You can't ban it. You can pretend to ban it, countries could get together and do something similar to nuclear nonproliferation, but as we see today that is only a stopgap, and the big countries that were already doing it will keep doing it.
If it wasn't a leak, we need to understand the geopolitical dynamics that led to this, if this is the case it was on par with Hiroshima and surface nuclear weapons testing, it is as dangerous a technology as nuclear weapons.
Problem is unlike a nuke, a virus can not be controlled, and gives little bargaining power when compared to nukes. If the prestige of this research was taken away, China would stop investing in it.
If the investigation uncovers a covert offensive bioweapons program there would be major repercussions. Repercussions a state would do almost anything to avoid.
Concretely what are you imagining here? US/WHO/UN says "there was a covert bioweapons program" and China says "no there isn't" and then... we invade? We embargo China?
The CCP would lose face, which is one of the worst fates for them. No more mandate from the heavens. Sure, they could try to deny it and claim the world is jealous of China or something like that, but that's unlikely to work for very long, especially with the rest of the planet. Losing their mandate from the heavens to rule China could very well lead to their ouster and perhaps the balkanization of China. Losing the respect of the rest of the world at a time when China wants to be the other major superpower, would be disastrous for them. In a multipolar world, the superpowers compete against each other for the loyalty of the rest of the world. Hard to do that when every single country on the planet suffered during the pandemic.
Lose face in the eyes of whom? Not clear to me that "this came out of our advanced bio research lab" is more damning than "this came out of our extremely unhygienic wet markets in urban centers."
These things move slowly and by little bits over time. If there were to be found a covert bio weapons program it costs China some credibility, not much but a bit and over time it just keeps happening.
Maybe so, but it’s also naive to think we’ll ever get to certainty or near-certainty about the lab leak hypothesis without China’s participation (which, if culpable, we obviously will not get and cannot force).
So the argument should take the form of, “jeez, this was awful and even if this was natural or artificial, we are purposely producing stuff like this on a daily basis in labs that regularly make mistakes.”
At the very least, we can look at our own response to the pandemic, both government and societal, and agree that huge mistakes were made, and lessons need to be learned instead of taking the usual "Hey, let's just move on and forget about all the evil things we did" approach. There certainly needs to be a reckoning for the tech world that gleefully jumped on the authoritarian bandwagon and tried, somewhat successfully at times, to stifle all opposition to the botched pandemic response.
Why does it matter? We have multiple examples that virtually certainly aren't lab related. Even if this was a lab oops doesn't make the others go away. This time it just hit the jackpot on being able to spread well: spread before symptoms. We don't have enough understanding of genetics to engineer this.
Covid is actually low in the lethality range for rampages from whatever is the underlying virus, it's just the others haven't spread so well. Finding that underlying virus could be useful, figuring out exactly how the zoonotic jump happened is simply an exercise in finger-pointing that will do nothing about the fact that they do happen naturally.
Similar widespread infection happened a few years before with SARS. Many countries even had procedures and emergency medical stock from there, and just discarded it for budget reasons from 2018.
All this “prevent it from recurring” is cute but wont last long if history can tell.
I mean you're right. It's weird that people are fixated on the specific way this outbreak occurred. Any plausible and proven way an outbreak of roughly this type could occur is equally significant, and I think is pretty well understood. If there was a strong will to reduce those risks it could happen without us knowing any specifics.
China wanting to have billions upon billions of citizens means it’s only right for them to own up to the occasions when those billions of people cause billions or trillions worth of economic damages to the entire world.
Like it or not, if it’s Chinas fault then they should be forced to pay reparations. At the very least held accountable and change the circumstances that led to them breeding the virus.
Genuinely interested to know under what circumstances you envisage China being 'forced' to do anything. Held accountable means nothing here, and paying reparations is for the weak op cit History.
How many billions in economic damage and millions in lives would that take? I mean I get the desire to see people and countries held responsible for things, but at a certain point you have to ask what the cost you're willing to pay to make that happen is.
I am not a religious person in general, but I do sometimes wonder if society as a whole isn't losing something valuable in the declining beliefs in a cosmic balancing even if a secular balancing can't occur. Whether that's karma or judgement day, there's a lot of anger floating about these days about wrongs that are just realistically too costly to address, that in other belief systems would at least be assuaged by the belief that they would be addressed in the after life.
Populations around the world would force their governments hand If it comes out that China knew they were responsible while blocking every single meaningful investigation into the root cause.
