Manic of a panic is geopolitical

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

All this biased-or-not bickering is pointless - I keep saying, try to stick to data-driven and link-supported argumentation as much as possible.

Any further pure-bickering posts are gonna get memory-holed - links and representative-sample quotes, that's what we want.

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Oh, please, why bring Snopes and their inane partisan-colored "fact checking" into this?

So are your ready to take your own medicine?

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

So are your ready to take your own medicine?

When you can point out a post of mine that satisfies the "pure bickering" characterization, i.e. that does not contain significant on-topic substance, sure.

[kladner]

I have to say that you seem to be in attack mode. The piece detailed the money, and the breakdown. That seems like pertinent information, which could be otherwise verified if you dispute the numbers.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffsb&q=us+...v167-1&ia=news
was the search. I was looking for evidence of something I remembered of a US doctor discussing interactions with the lab and sounding supervisory regarding containment.

The bit on the funding was side-catch, but current as the Cheeto bleats about it and points fingers.

EDIT:

I believe that this article refers to the doctor I was remembering, though the details are not quite what I thought.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ab-coronavirus

Where did Covid-19 come from? What we know about its origins

.................................................

In a statement to the Guardian, James Le Duc, the head of the Galveston National Laboratory in the US, the biggest active biocontainment facility on a US academic campus, also poured cold water on the suggestion.

“There is convincing evidence that the new virus was not the result of intentional genetic engineering and that it almost certainly originated from nature, given its high similarity to other known bat-associated coronaviruses,” he said.
What about an accidental escape of a wild sample because of poor lab safety practices?

The accidental release of a wild sample has been the focus of most attention, although the “evidence” offered is at best highly circumstantial.

The Washington Post has reported concerns in 2018 over security and management weakness from US embassy officials who visited the WIV several times, although the paper also conceded there was no conclusive proof the lab was the source of the outbreak.

Le Duc, however, paints a different picture of the WIV. “I have visited and toured the new BSL4 laboratory in Wuhan, prior to it starting operations in 2017- … It is of comparable quality and safety measures as any currently in operation in the US or Europe.”

He also described encounters with Shi Zhengli, the Chinese virologist at the WIV who has led research into bat coronaviruses, and discovered the link between bats and the Sars virus that caused disease worldwide in 2003, describing her as “fully engaged, very open and transparent about her work, and eager to collaborate”.

Maureen Miller, an epidemiologist who worked with Shi as part of a US-funded viral research programme, echoed Le Duc’s assessment. She said she believed the lab escape theory was an “absolute conspiracy theory” and referred to Shi as “brilliant”.

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

I grabbed all the data that they had and plotted it. The red is this season, the bold blue line is the mean. I don't think there is anything to it. Just pick limited data and make sure there is a higher than average year in it. (And I am guessing that the drop is principally road deaths. But there is that spike afterward.

Thanks for checking into that.
https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest seems to confirm your results and indicates a bump of +20,800 deaths (+15%) for the US to date; +12400 for NYC alone, or ~60% of the nation's computed excess death rate. Probably a lot of the NYC bump relates to mayor DeBlasio's encouragement early on of New Yorkers to continue to go out to eat etc.
People are terrible at understanding risks, especially in the beginning of a disaster. It's built in. https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/...me-your-brain/ (The full Psychology Today article seems to no longer be available.) The first stage of responding to loss is denial.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by kladner

I have to say that you seem to be in attack mode. The piece detailed the money, and the breakdown. That seems like pertinent information, which could be otherwise verified if you dispute the numbers.

You posted only the Snopes link and its conclusory "While it isn't unusual to see international cooperation in the field of virology, this claim stretches the truth", implying that something in the post of mine to which you were replying was nonfactual or exaggerated - i.e. the "attack mode" started with you. If you wanted to highlight the actual history or the research in question, you should've posted snips about that instead. Excuse me for assuming that the selected snips you excerpted from the Snopes entry were the ones which you wished to highlight. /sarc

Also, the various officials described as "having poured cold water" etc. on the idea of an accidental lab release are unconvincing - the saying "never believe anything until it is officially denied comes to mind. Let's take Mr. LeDuc:

“There is convincing evidence that the new virus was not the result of intentional genetic engineering and that it almost certainly originated from nature, given its high similarity to other known bat-associated coronaviruses,” he said.

So if gather several different kinds of wild-animal hosts of various strains of Coronavirus in a lab setting, with the intent of cross-infecting some test animals with 2 or more of the distinct strains in order to create genetic viral hybrids - which is precisely the aim of the "gain of function" research covered by the grant monies in question and being performed at the Wuhan lab - the resulting hybrids "originated from nature" - the researchers simply did an accelerated, targeted form of what happens in nature. The phrase "intentional genetic engineering" is a deflection because that can mean many things - in this case, an engineered meet-up of wild viral substrains. As it happens, there is a recent paper in the prestigious journal PLoS Biology featuring an example of what appears to have been such an accident. That paper also describes the kinds of clues which can be used to fingerprint such viral hybrids - in this case, the original strains which were hybridized were natural, but the hybrid appears to show a anomalous "freeze" in the expected subsequent mutation-drven drift of its genome:

Virus genomes help to explain why a major livestock disease has re-emerged in Europe -- ScienceDaily

Livestock diseases like bluetongue virus (BTV) can have devastating economic and health consequences, but their origins can be difficult to establish. New research published in the open access journal PLOS Biology this week shows that the recent re-emergence of BTV in France could have been caused by human activities, based on the virus' unusual genetic makeup.

Bluetongue virus, a pathogen that infects sheep and cattle, has caused billions of euros of damage to the European farming industry over the last two decades. In the new study, led by researchers at the University of Glasgow (UK) with a consortium of European collaborators, the authors compared genomes of the virus before and after it re-emerged in France in 2015. BTV first arrived in Europe in 2006 from unknown sources. It was controlled through mass vaccination by 2010, and no cases were reported until it re-emerged in 2015. The authors' genome analyses revealed that during both the 2006 and 2015 outbreaks, BTV accumulated novel mutations in a manner expected for a rapidly evolving virus. During the period in between the two outbreaks, however, the researchers noted a curious lack of mutations, indicating that the virus was likely not circulating during this period. The genetic similarity between the original and re-emergent viruses suggests that the 2015 outbreak was caused by infectious material that somehow arose from the first outbreak.

Virus persistence over multiple years in the absence of genetic changes would upset our understanding of virus biology. A more plausible scenario, the authors argue, is that the virus resurfaced after being stored in frozen samples. And since artificial insemination and embryo transfer are widely used in the livestock industry, they say, this transmission mechanism should be evaluated by future work.

Prof. Massimo Palmarini, one of the senior authors of the study says: "In order to survive, to be transmitted and to find new hosts, viruses need to replicate. New mutations are an inevitable consequence of this, so viruses can't remain 'frozen in time'. While there is still lots for us to learn about virus biology, the most plausible explanation for our findings is that exposure to infectious material, stored from the earlier outbreak, caused the most recent emergence of this virus in Europe."

Now, with the Covid-19 pandemic virus, the natural mutation rate appears rather lower than for Bluetongue virus, so the same kind of genomic-mutation-rate analysis may not be possible for the short timeframe in question. But it is a useful example by way of establishing that there is a precedent.

[Till]

Originally Posted by kriesel

https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest seems to confirm your results...

I used to like that page but its data on cases and fatalities stats is from April, 28. Before, all stats had been updated on a daily basis.

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by Till

I used to like that page but its data on cases and fatalities stats is from April, 28. Before, all stats had been updated on a daily basis.

They're doing a 7-day rolling average for smoothing variations in daily reporting.The rolling average unavoidably responds more slowly. In daily reporting, because a lot of outpatient clinics operate Monday through Friday, the weekends had markedly lower rates of case identification.

[kriesel]

The distinction of natural versus man-made fell nearly two centuries ago. "Friedrich Wöhler's discovery, in 1828, that urea can be produced from inorganic starting materials, was an important conceptual milestone in chemistry. It showed, for the first time, that a substance, previously known only as a byproduct of life, could be synthesized in the laboratory, without biological starting materials, thereby contradicting the widely held doctrine vitalism, which stated that only living things could produce the chemicals of life." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urea

A molecule of urea is the same whether it is produced by our metabolism or in a chemistry lab or chemical factory, and a urea molecule from one source can not be differentiated from one from the other source.
Molecules can be built from other molecules. RNAs and DNAs are molecules. Proteins are molecules. Viruses are assemblies of molecules. Covid19 is a single strand RNA virus, fairly elementary compared to multistrand genetic material, and 30k bases, not very large at all. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020...mutations.html (Humans are 3 billion base pairs per somatic cell). Each base or base-pair represents only 2 bits of information, so the RNA of a COVID19 virus is 7500 bytes in chemically encoded form. And perfect synthesis is not needed; some mutations (errors) leave it functional. It's my understanding there have been dozens or hundreds of mutations identified in Covid19 virus samples already. That's what they use to try to trace national epidemics back through their routes of transmission from one nation to another. It's easy for a single strand RNA virus to mutate, since there's no redundancy as there is in dual-strand DNA, so no "backup" from which to perform error correction.

At some point (if the human race does not already) we will collectively know how to create (synthesize) everything required for a simple functioning virus, beginning with inorganic precursors. And how to cause it to assemble those molecules into a viral capsule. Being able to genetically engineer a virus to attack such things as glioblastomas is a possible justification for creating new ones.
We already have the means via a sort of cut and paste technique to use live tissue to put a little of this virus and a little of that together and mass produce them. There was a published paper in Nature in 2015 involving the Wuhan lab that stated successfully combining a bat coronavirus with some SARS genetic material to infect the HeLa human cell line had been achieved. BSL labs around the world are notorious for occasional leakage.

https://www.rt.com/news/486425-covid...dlier-strains/ "Chinese scientists have found that Europe and America’s East Coast have been infected by some of the most aggressive Covid-19 strains, as they discovered dozens of virus mutations. These destroy a host’s cells faster than others.

The ability of the novel coronavirus to mutate has been previously vastly underestimated, a team from China’s Zhejiang University, led by Professor Li Lanjuan, says in a new study. The group found as many as 33 virus mutations in just 11 coronavirus patients they examined in the city of Hangzhou."

[tServo]

Ask Dustin Hoffman:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avNraWT8CSI

[Dr Sardonicus]

If my understanding is correct, the "escaped research virus" idea is plausible enough that it shouldn't simply be dismissed out of hand, but there is no actual evidence that this is how COVID-19 came into the world.

One possible (in theory) means to check the idea would be for the virology lab to publish the genetic sequencing of the viruses it actually produced. In practice, of course, verifying the results might be difficult.

Still -- if the lab published the genetic info, at it did not resemble COVID-19, that might calm a lot of jittery nerves.

OTOH, if there is no actual evidence that this is what actually happened, for the President of the United States to basically state as fact that it did, and further to suggest that it was intentional, is IMO irresponsible. It is also likely foreign to the purpose of learning the truth, which (also IMO) suits the President just fine.

[kladner]

From just after the excerpt above is this discussion of different viral strains and where they first appeared.

While the experts who spoke to the Guardian made clear that understanding of the origins of the virus remained provisional, they added that the current state of knowledge of the initial spread also created problems for the lab escape theory.
When Peter Forster, a geneticist at Cambridge, compared sequences of the virus genome collected early in the Chines outbreak – and later globally – he identified three dominant strains.

Early in the outbreak, two strains appear to have been in circulation at roughly at the same time – strain A and strain B – with a C variant later developing from strain B.

But in a surprise finding, the version with the closest genetic similarity to bat coronavirus was not the one most prevalent early on in the central Chinese city of Wuhan but instead associated with a scattering of early cases in the southern Guangdong province.
Between 24 December 2019 and 17 January 2020, Forster explains, just three out of 23 cases in Wuhan were type A, while the rest were type B. In patients in Guangdong province, however, five out of nine were found to have type A of the virus.

“The very small numbers notwithstanding,” said Forster, “the early genome frequencies until 17 January do not favour Wuhan as an origin over other parts of China, for example five of nine Guangdong/Shenzhen patients who had A types.”
In other words, it still remains far from certain that Wuhan was even necessarily where the virus first emerged.