Tag: covid

Coronaviruses

Eventually I think we will categorize all the recent betacoronavirus outbreaks (Sars-1, Sars-2, MERS) as part of this broader process, and require a vaccination strategy that can be quickly deployed against new recombinations from this original ancestral betacoronavirus as they randomly emerge from the primordial stew across many animal species, including ours. The evidence thus far points to recombinations resulting in the emergence of a distinct dangerous variant with some regularity.

2020-11-23: Horseshoe bat origin?

2 lab freezers in Asia have yielded surprising discoveries. Researchers have found a coronavirus that is closely related to SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the pandemic, in horseshoe bats stored in a freezer in Cambodia. A team reported the discovery of another closely related coronavirus — also found in frozen bat droppings.

The viruses are the first known relatives of SARS-CoV-2 to be found outside China, which supports the World Health Organization’s search across Asia for the pandemic’s animal origin. Strong evidence suggests that SARS-CoV-2 originated in horseshoe bats, but whether it passed directly from bats to people, or through an intermediate host, remains a mystery.

COVID-19 origins

Support for the idea that something resembling SARS-COV-2 might have been circulating in the region before the pandemic began also comes from another intriguing observation, the low incidence of COVID-19 in South-East Asia, particularly in Vietnam.

A great piece on lab vs zoonotic COVID-19 origins

If the case that SARS2 originated in a lab is so substantial, why isn’t this more widely known? As may now be obvious, there are many people who have reason not to talk about it. The list is led, of course, by the Chinese authorities. But virologists in the United States and Europe have no great interest in igniting a public debate about the gain-of-function experiments that their community has been pursuing for years.

COVID-19 & Architecture

The pedestrian streets were overdue, a counter to the dominance of cars. “It’s a ridiculous situation that so much of urban space is given up to the stupid boxes standing around most of the time.” The upheaval makes it easier to imagine dramatic changes. “When you have a momentary lapsing of the status quo, it allows everyone to see that something’s possible.”

COVID-19 Will Win

Thanks to the effort of millions of people, we were close to a great success story. But because of the failures of Trump and Chauvin, of the CDC and the WHO, of public-health experts and Fox News hosts, we are, instead, likely to give up—and tolerate that 100K’s of our fellow citizens will die needless deaths.

80% not susceptible to COVID-19?

His models suggest that the stark difference between outcomes in the UK and Germany is not primarily an effect of different government actions (such as better testing and earlier lockdowns) but is better explained by intrinsic differences between the populations that make the “susceptible population” in Germany — the group that is vulnerable to Covid-19 — much smaller than in the UK.

Even within the UK, the numbers point to the same thing: that the “effective susceptible population” was never 100%, and was at most 50% and probably more like only 20% of the population. He emphasises that the analysis is not yet complete, but “I suspect, once this has been done, it will look like the effective non-susceptible portion of the population will be 80%.”