Friday, November 19, 2021

More likely the wet market, after all

The New York Times has a lengthy version of a story in Science (which I also subscribe to - $66 US a year - bargain!) about a scientist who thinks the WHO made a mistake in attributing the first case of COVID in Wuhan.  He thinks it was a woman from the wet market, as were most of the other early cases.

The scientist, Michael Worobey, a leading expert in tracing the evolution of viruses at the University of Arizona, came upon timeline discrepancies by combing through what had already been made public in medical journals, as well as video interviews in a Chinese news outlet with people believed to have the first two documented infections.

Dr. Worobey argues that the vendor’s ties to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, as well as a new analysis of the earliest hospitalized patients’ connections to the market, strongly suggest that the pandemic began there.

“In this city of 11 million people, half of the early cases are linked to a place that’s the size of a soccer field,” Dr. Worobey said. “It becomes very difficult to explain that pattern if the outbreak didn’t start at the market.”

Several experts, including one of the pandemic investigators chosen by the W.H.O., said that Dr. Worobey’s detective work was sound and that the first known case of Covid was most likely a seafood vendor.

But some of them also said the evidence was still insufficient to decisively settle the larger question of how the pandemic began. They suggested that the virus probably infected a “patient zero” sometime before the vendor’s case and then reached critical mass to spread widely at the market. Studies of changes in the virus’s genome — including one done by Dr. Worobey himself — have suggested that the first infection happened in roughly mid-November 2019, weeks before the vendor got sick.

By the way, whatever happened to the story, which the Chinese media was keen to spread, that an Italian had COVID months before it showed up in Wuhan?   Here's the story, at Reuters.   But here's a much later report on why some suspect it wasn't an accurate study.   All very complicated. 

 

1 comment:

GMB said...

No thats all nonsense. It was a media conspiracy to pretend it came from there right from the start and there was never any credibility to it. Poor hygiene doesn't spawn new diseases. Poor hygiene only leads to old diseases. Dysentery. Cholera and so forth. New diseases come out of the laboratory or are chemical warfare posing as biological meanies, or even moreso its the barbaric and idiotic practice of vaccination itself that brings on the new problems. I say that even though I haven't yet determined whether the tetanus and rabies shots are invalid or not. Definitely all the others are rubbish.

But its worse than that. We know that there was never a Sars-Cov-2 virus. We know that now. Its even worse than that. Viruses cannot cause disease. I realise that leads to a gap in our thinking. If viruses don't cause problems, how is it that I caught these nasty colds and flu, before I found out how to avoid them? In science its easier to rule things out then find out what the real cause is but this whole thing is shot through with deep state terrorism. So these guys may have ten different ways to cause the loss of smell and breathing difficulties. But they don't do it using a virus.

We have underrated pesticides, environmental poisons, parasites, space weather and so forth. I'm not saying that this explains the whole gap. The only thing we can lock in is that viruses don't cause problems.