COVID-19 Source: Will we ever know?

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Because eating animals and/or being bitten by animals is much more likely to infect you. We've had millions of years to evolve defenses against environmental pathogens - but most of those defenses don't work if it enters via your mouth or blood.

 

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Stop the conspiracy insinuations.

We know this virus came from Chinese bats. We know it. OK?

The fact that it was apparently in Europe a month before everyone thought simply pushes everything back a bit. The guy is a fishmonger (a customer-facing trade) in NE Paris, where there are plenty of Chinese. We also know the Chinese were slow to admit its existence, even domestically. So a month earlier does not have any implications as to the origin. It came from China, because it is a Chinese bat virus.

We know it is natural, not genetically manipulated. (We can also see that it makes a crap bioweapon, so that wacko stuff really is for Fat Freddy et al.)

It may, conceivably, have leaked from the Wuhan lab, rather than being caught from the wild. We know they were working on bat viruses and I've read a Newsweek article claiming some of this involved gain of function work, by passing the virus through intermediary animals, to see if any of the surviving mutations might be more prone to infect Man. I await corroboration of this story - Newsweek is not the journalistic force it once was. However there is no evidence of a leak, so far.

 

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From your own link:

But theories that this is the place where COVID-19 jumped from wild animals to humans remain speculation.
A study by Chinese researchers claimed the first person to be diagnosed with COVID-19 was identified on December 1, 2019 and that person had "no contact" with the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.
Wu Wenjuan, a senior doctor at Wuhan's Jinyintan Hospital and one of the authors of the study, told the BBC Chinese Service that the patient was an elderly man who suffered from Alzheimer's disease.
"He lived four or five buses from the seafood market, and because he was sick he basically didn't go out," she said.
If he was patient zero, then the genesis of the virus linked to bats likely lurked somewhere else.

Where and how it started really does matter.​

Please explain?

It states the first diagnosed patient, and not the actual location of source...
I may need to remind you that the incubation period of this illness is between 4-14 days sometimes up to 21 days, sometimes asymptomatic.
Diagnosing a patient after an incubation period does not a source make.
Contact tracing a man with Alzheimer disease would be like unraveling a ball of string..

 

and that amounts to scientific evidence?
likely?
Sounds like speculation to me..

 

You seem to be suggesting that the Covid-19 virus originated, as Trump does.

These conspiracy theories being promoted by the USA have no founding in science... yet.

 

To help people get a grip on this issue:
COVID-19:

• Spreaders can be asymptomatic and can come from and travel from any place in the world.
  
• Spreaders usually have an incubation period of between 4 -14 days before symptoms emerge.
• Currently there are at least two strains of COVID-19 being studied. One more deadly than the other. This "mutation" apparently complicates vaccine research.

Making a claim of source of origin is not that easy... if one wishes to follow the line taken by the popular press then by all means conclude as you wish to...but that is not science...

 

Bells,
I would be very interested in your thoughts about this observation and subsequent question.

If the origin of this pandemic was indeed the Wuhan wet market and given the huge loss of life and damage to the Chinese economy, why would they allow ( with WHO agreement) the wet markets to reopen with their wild life produce?
It makes no logical sense, to me and others, to reopen wild life sales when those sales are promoting such a huge risk to the Chinese economy and people...

It would be hugely in the Chinese governments self interest to ban the sale of wild life from fresh produce markets. IMO. but they haven't.
Why not, do you think?

 

?? Did we stop eating pork after the 2009 swine flu epidemic?

 

non sequitur

key word "wild" as in wild life...you must have missed it...

 

I am no expert on the difference between wild animals and domesticated ones but even I know that when it comes to viruses, parasites and bacteria etc. there is a difference.. Animal husbandry tends to deal with the potential better than the wild does.
Perhaps another thread needs to be started some where on this forum that delves into those differences.
Perhaps we all may learn something...

 

That's an expensive culture and diet!!!
A quick google and we find:

China suffered its worst economic contraction since at least the 1970s in the first quarter as it fought the coronavirus, and weak consumer spending and factory activity point to a longer, harder recovery than initially expected.
The world's second-largest economy shrank 6.8% from a year ago in the three months ending in March after factories, shops and travel were closed to contain the infection, official data showed Friday.
That was stronger than some forecasts that called for a contraction of up to 16% but China's worst performance since before market-style economic reforms started in 1979.
Some forecasters earlier said China, which led the way into a global shutdown to fight the virus, might rebound as early as this month. Activity started to improve in March after China's outbreak eased and the ruling Communist Party allowed factories to reopen, but analysts have been cutting growth forecasts as negative trade and other data pile up.
​

https://www.euronews.com/2020/04/17...orst-downturn-since-since-70s-in-virus-battle

Then add in all the officially recognized (4,633 - 08-05/2020) and unreported deaths and ongoing morbidity, and if you are right then perhaps you see this as a particular quirk in Chinese thinking?

 

And yet that epidemic started in domesticated pigs. And I assume you have heard of rabies, tuberculosis, Mad Cow disease, brucellosis, toxoplasmosis and anthrax?

Looks like the facts don't support your "speculation."

 

And what speculation are you referring to?

 

Your speculation that there is less of a threat from domesticated animals than wild ones.

 

Perhaps the entire world needs to become Vegan?

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Rabies:
Virus
has known records back to 2000BC
Implicated in both domestic and wild animals.
Most likely originates from wild animals.

Tuberculosis:
Bacteria
Has known records back to 17000 years ago in wild Bison.

Bovine Spongform Encephalopathy ( Mad Cow disease)
Prion
Unknown origins.
(Possibly due to feeding "vegan" cows with animal bone and meat by products)

Brucellosis:
Bacteria
A common and known feature of natural untreated cows milk and some raw meat.

Toxoplasmosis:
Parasitic
Transmission can occur when eating raw meat.
Anthrax:
Bacterium

So apart from Rabies the rest of your examples do not refer to viruses.
=====
Other viral diseases to involve domesticated and other animals

Swine flu
Virus
For ever present in pigs
Avian Flu
Virus
Occurs naturally in birds
MERS
Virus
Bats
SARS
Virus
Bats
COVID-19
Virus
Bats

and what is most important is there is currently no vaccine for coronaviruse's propagated by Bats and Bats are a strictly wild animal and not typically domesticated.

So why risk the Chinese nations economy and population ( not to mention the world's generally) with WHO approval by allowing the handling and consumption of wild Bats?

 

Get this into your thick skull: this virus is 96% identical to bat viruses found in caves in Yunnan, in China.

It is a Chinese bat virus. This is beyond any doubt.