Given the location, the timing, the symptoms, the severity of the illness (it's unusual for 'flu to put healthy young adults in hospital) I think we can be pretty confident in our guess.
My Aunt was killed by the flu. She had a pre-existing unknown heart-condition and despite her healthy lifestyle the flu weakened her heart enough that she needed a heart-transplant in her early 20s. She died at age 27.
I tell this story whenever it is possible, to educate people about what the flu is capable of doing, whenever someone says the flu is "no big deal." Statistically, perhaps not. Unless you're the statistic that is.
Having had a number of bad colds before I actually got a bad flu, I always thought my colds were the flu. Not a huge deal. When it was confirmed to be the flu when I talked to her later, the mobile doctor said that many people think the same because they tupically don't go to the doctor for confirmation, if the doctor even chooses to test.
A real (non-covid) flu had me feeling like I was on death's door for a week, and much of that time was spent wishing it would take me.
I got H1N1. The only reason I didn’t end up in a hospital was because I forced myself to stay hydrated and somewhat lucid when I wasn’t able to sleep. It was really bad.
I got a type-A flu this year in early January, and holy shit was it painful, I hadn't been that sick in 25 years. Some co-workers and relatives also got it (in opposite sides of the Earth!) and reported the same, this year the flu was really strong.
In comparison, I had corona last week and it was a walk in the park (I am also quad-vaccinated, that might have helped).
> In comparison, I had corona last week and it was a walk in the park (I am also quad-vaccinated, that might have helped).
I can attest that somewhere between vaccines, potential acquired immunity and variants having reduced strength, my pair of confirmed Covid experiences (March 2020, July 2022) went from "the sickest I've ever felt, with symptoms recurring for months and persistent-to-present reduced smell capability" to "a mild cold".
Just for anecdata, I had the J&J vaccine early on, then the bivalent booster when it became available. In January, I got COVID, and I was "sickest I've ever felt" for about three days, "bad cold" for a week, "fatigue and brain fog" for another week, and "smoker's cough in the morning" for several months afterward.
I also had a very bad flu in early Jan2020.
I'm typically very strong but my body was sapped of energy for 5 days and was different than any other sickness I've experienced.
They are replying directly to a tangential comment that someone else made. It might not be relevant to this overall thread, but it's relevant to this particular comment chain.
Except, of course, we don't know who they were, let alone whether they were otherwise healthy or whether they were young adults. Whether somebody is confident in your guesses is up to them I guess.
According to US government sources, they were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. Ben Hu was the researcher who lead “gain-of-function” research on SARS-like coronaviruses at WIV.
1. They made a mistake in the lab, exposing themselves to a virus (not covid-19)
2. That virus was non-human-transmissible
3. The exposure happened 1-several weeks before the actual start of covid-19 at the market
That's not impossible, especially if the lab was sloppy and (1) happened fairly regularly.
Given the early concentration of cases around the market, and the detection of covid-19 on market materials, the lab-leak coincidence seems to be:
1. They made a mistake in the lab, exposing themselves to covid-19
2. They nearly-immediately went to the market, and spent significant time there to get the place loaded up with the virus
3. They didn't go much of anywhere else
4. They didn't interact much with others at the lab
That's not impossible either, but I don't see that lab-leak scenario appears much more likely than the non-lab-leak scenario.
> 2. They nearly-immediately went to the market, and spent significant time there to get the place loaded up with the virus
Wouldn't it be enough to just go there, buy some food, caugh on a few of the workers there, and they'd spread the thing around to other shoppers in the next few days?
2 was meant to be in coordination with 3 -- the initial outbreak was at the market, so the researchers need to do two things: go to the market enough to infect people there, and not go other places to infect people elsewhere.
Could you remind us what the "non-lab-leak scenario" is again?
To be clear, is your "likeliness" determined on whether we can find a creature that is more similar to covid than RaTG13 (we haven't) or something else?
The non lab leak scenario is just what it historically has been for ~70% of all viruses that we can trace (and probably the remainder as well, but we have no evidence): zoonotic jump.
The lab-leak scenario presumes zoonotic jump, too. Just rather than from something in the wild, it's from humanized (ACE2-transgenic) mice, which WIV was known to be using to study SARS-like Coronaviruses.
The coronaviruses being studied at WIV included RaTG13, one of the closest relatives (96.1% genomic match) to SARS-CoV-2 ever found in the wild.
But a key difference between SARS-CoV-2 and it's wild relatives is the spike protein with affinity for the ACE2 receptor, so it would have had to have evolved through an intermediate host with a human-like ACE2 receptor. For example, ACE2-transgenic lab mice.
This does not itself rule out the wild-origin theory, but no wild host that could explain the missing link from RaTG13 to SARS-CoV-2 has yet been found.
Indeed. So the only reasonable conclusion so far is that we haven't found the reservoir host yet. This may take a while and it may even never happen. If and when we do we will finally be able to make another step in this whole saga.
> If there was GoF being done on the sample (adding of the spike protein to infect humans), that could be the remaining percentage.
I do not believe one bit the only "reasonable conclusion" is it has to be from nature.
Between the lab sample, the outbreak area, the GoF program being run, the timing, history of lab leaks, and the reaction, a lab leak is very reasonable...
I think there may have been a slight misunderstanding here (I'm not particularly familiar with this topic so I may have some concepts mistaken):
> The lab-leak scenario presumes zoonotic jump, too. Just rather than from something in the wild, it's from humanized (ACE2-transgenic) mice
> So the only reasonable conclusion so far is that we haven't found the reservoir host yet.
> I do not believe one bit the only "reasonable conclusion" is it has to be from nature.
If it's discovered that the reservoir host was a mouse in a lab at WIV then "we will finally be able to make another step in this whole saga" in the same way as it being discovered as a wild host. It might be worth reading their comment again.
(Again, I'm not deeply familiar with this topic and may be totally off base; gluing together my personal understanding of the meanings of these words has me arriving at this conclusion. I'm also attempting to clarify someone else's statements so take another grain of salt for that.)
Zoonotic would mean it was a natural occurrence. The GoF program of adding the spike protein to attach to the ACE2 receptor and putting it in a mouse would NOT be zoonotic, but lab made. It's a lab mouse. Not a jump, but a deliberate placement in a lab.
Obviously the implications matter whether it occurred in nature or deliberately by man. If it was the latter, then the program that was supposed to prepare against the potential of a natural virus actually made something that may never have happened, and then went on to kill millions.
It sounds like the claim is that it’s “from humanized (ACE2-transgenic) mice“. I assume “humanized” is referring to the genome or something else about the genetics but these organisms still shouldn’t be considered humans (or at least this opinion seems reasonable; if it’s factually wrong I’m open to being corrected).
But if it’s “from” non-human “to” human, isn’t that a zoonotic jump, or is there some mistake in this understanding?
Thanks for the explanations. Admittedly, my introduction to the term “zoonotic” was from playing Plague Inc: Evolved (if one is not familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_Inc:_Evolved) so you might see where I’m coming from. I do roughly understand this to be the meaning.
Interesting. I noticed that one of my kids picked up a lot about how electricity works as well as simple and/or/not/nand gates. But that doesn't mean he knows anything about electricity, merely how the game logic presents it, which is close but not quite how it really works. That doesn't mean he knows nothing either, but it does mean that such knowledge should always be verified with proper sources to ensure you're not accidentally learning something isn't quite true.
Yeah, I have difficulty with this, in particular trusting sources. Wikipedia is almost always correct on a technical level but very information dense (Good Thing! Recently I looked up “captain obvious disambiguation” for a joke and learned the word “lapalissade”) so it sometimes requires a certain mindset to learn from there. Some public school teachers don’t like being questioned(!!) and I think that’s caused me to have an internalized skepticism of academics, ironically despite the likelihood they’re more informed. Rando stranger on the internet can be good source but maybe a bullshitter instead.
On the whole, and especially in particular if one pays attention, people here tend to make “good faith” statements such that a difference of opinion similar to this thread is genuinely informative if one is willing to consider the possibility of any particular thing being true (or not). It helps to understand the difference between statements of fact and opinion. I’ve found it helps also to be open about a lack of knowledge if one is willing to ask questions and “be taught” in a fashion, despite the reputation that such leading statements have.
I try to remind myself that all topics which are able to capture academics’ attention have a lot of depth to them, practically by necessity. My physics teacher in high school was fantastic so I have a solid understanding of the concepts taught in that class -- in my experience, MKS logic has been a helpful mental exercise for understanding any abstraction. But it would still take years of study for me to really understand the things we can’t explain about the physical world. And that’s true of almost anything. Best to keep an open mind.
That turned into a bit more than I expected. I appreciate your comment, if it’s not already obvious! I hope you have a nice day, whenever you read this.
Except that’s not true. Chinese culture is different.
"There is no culture of staying at home for minor symptoms," he said. "When people feel sick they all go to hospitals, which may easily crash the healthcare system."
Importantly, Covid very rarely results in severe symptoms for middle aged adults. In the vast majority of adults, the symptoms are mild and nonspecific.
So the idea that all of these researchers would have contracted Covid and present with symptoms specific/indicative of Covid is absurd. The chances of that must be infinitesimally small.
If they had the typical, flu- and cold-like symptoms that most people experience, why would anyone ever even notice? It's extremely common to have illnesses with these symptoms in an office environment, to the point it would be strange if they didn't.
> "Importantly, Covid very rarely results in severe symptoms for middle aged adults. In the vast majority of adults, the symptoms are mild and nonspecific."
I've had Covid three times (March '20, December '20, August '22) and as a healthy middle-aged adult, I'm not sure I'd agree.
The first two times were pretty wretched: I was sick enough that I could barely eat or get out of bed for a week or so, and it was many weeks before I felt completely recovered. The third time (after getting vaccinated) was definitely milder and I recovered much more quickly, but was still pretty ill for a couple of days.
But notably, the symptoms for me were quite different from a typical 'flu. One thing that was very distinctive/specific for me was the wild changes in taste perception: I couldn't even eat some foods that I normally like due to them tasting so bad. I struggled to brush my teeth because I couldn't taste the mint flavour in toothpaste, only bitter chemicals!
Of course, it's fair to say that it doesn't affect everyone equally: some of my friends and family had similar experiences to me while others only had fairly mild symptoms.
> Covid very rarely results in severe symptoms for middle aged adults
Correct, but I don't recall this being the narrative the media were following in 2020, despite stuff like this:
"After nearly 45,000 Covid deaths in England and Wales, we can see that people of different ages have been exposed to dramatically differing risks. Fatalities among school-children have been remarkably low. Taking women aged 30–34 as an example, around 1 in 70,000 died from Covid over the 9 peak weeks of the epidemic. Since over 80% of these had pre-existing medical conditions, we estimate that a healthy women in this age-group had less than a 1 in 350,000 risk of dying from Covid, around 1/4 of the normal risk of an accidental death over this period.
Healthy children and young adults have been exposed to an extremely small risk during the peak of the epidemic, which would normally be deemed an acceptable part of life. Risks can be far higher for the elderly and those with pre-existing medical conditions."
"Data on deaths from covid-19 show an association with age that closely matches the “normal” age-related risk of death from all other causes that we all face each year, says statistician David Spiegelhalter in The BMJ today.
His findings are based on analysis of death certificate data for England and Wales over a 16 week (112 day) period between 7 March and 26 June 2020."
If you're claiming that, for instance, those aged under 40 without any comorbidities were at significantly higher risk of dying due to the impact of Covid-19 I think it would be good to post a reference for that.
The CDC publishes data showing causes of death by age cohort[0], it's worth looking at for the year 2020. Apparently they're still working on the 2021 figures.
The short version: Covid-19 just isn't a random killer - and certainly not of otherwise healthy under 40s - that everyone thinks it is/thought it was.
These numbers show that the number of deaths observed is beyond the sum of reported covid deaths + expected deaths from all other sources. Which indicates either that many covid deaths were misclassified as something else, or that the strain on the health system caused by covid resulted in significantly more deaths. If deaths were misclassified, it is certainly possible that some percentage of people in their 40s or 50s died of Covid, with cause of death listed as something else.
It's even worse than that. Those numbers are for deaths "with" COVID, not "of COVID". At one point, the UK was recording any death where the person had a positive COVID test at any time prior. Cancer victims and car accidents where recorded as COVID deaths. So, the odds of dying after catching COVID where highly exaggerated.
In England, a new weekly set of figures will also be published, showing the number of deaths that occur within 60 days of a positive test. Deaths that occur after 60 days will also be added to this figure if COVID-19 appears on the death certificate. This will provide an additional measure of the impact of the disease over time.
This follows concerns raised by academics from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine about the original measure, which counted anyone who had ever tested positive as a COVID-associated death. They called for the introduction of a 21-day measure in order to accurately assess the impact of the virus on mortality rates
The earliest strains of Covid were by far the most severe ones. It's not that surprising to me that the very first patients contracted a strain more likely to put them in the hospital.
> The earliest strains of Covid were by far the most severe ones. It's not that surprising to me that the very first patients contracted a strain more likely to put them in the hospital.
No, the only SARS-Cov-2 strain with (likely) decreased mortality is Omicron, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variants_of_SARS-CoV-2
The fact that Covid (as an illness) has become milder is due to the hosts adapting, not the virus being milder.
Not only the hosts, but also the hospitals. Treatments became available, and we learned what worked well and what didn't. The care a person who is infected today gets is very different from what people in the first months of the pandemic got and that's improved outcomes.
That's part of it. The other part is that once the weakest individuals in the population have died the remainder will be stronger on average and so they may be able to deal with infection that much better.
> "In particular Vanilla strains were milder than beta/delta."
Not my experience! OG Covid (March 2020) was just as severe as alpha/beta (December 2020). My most recent infection (August 2022) was much milder, but that could also be explained by being vaccinated.
I don't disagree with your linked comment. But my personal experience, not to mention the high level of hospitalisation and mortality at the time which resulted in the first UK lockdown, disagrees with your "Vanilla strains were milder than beta/delta." statement, if "Vanilla" was the variant circulating in the UK in March 2020.
My understanding is that newer strains aren't much different in terms of severity, but the hospitalization and mortality rates will change by some percentage because our treatment protocols improved. When covid first hit, people had no idea what to do with the infected. Doctors around the world were sharing information and research was underway but they all had to learn as they went along. Eventually things were bound to improve, even if the virus hadn't evolved at all.
COVID is only BSL-3. China has over 100 of those, so the odds of a city center being near a lab is much higher.
If COVID had an incubation period of a 1-2 weeks, it's also possible for the outbreak to occur in a city center that is not a likely location for human/bat/animal interactions, so the percentage will increase further.
The WIV has BSL-4, BSL-3 and BSL-2 labs. But the research involving insertion of human specific furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses sampled in the wild was done in BSL2 which just means a thin medical mask and gloves. https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
> Infectious material used in procedures with a potential for creating aerosols or splashes, or used in high concentrations or large volumes, must be handled in an annually certified biosafety cabinet.
Realistically, many people's bayesian priors are severely skewed against the lab leak hypothesis because it is associated with Donald Trump, and even intelligent people find it difficult to separate the message from the messenger.
Even if they had done it in the BSL-4 parts, the french partners in the facility actually left it after they saw how poorly the bsl-4 was implemented, only one French researcher stayed.
Confirmation that they were sick. Not confirmation of what they were sick with.