Coronavirus

Out of context: Reply #4446

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  • yuekit2

    @shapesalad Some interesting stuff I was reading recently about the origins of the original SARS outbreak...

    When SARS epidemic happened in 2002 it was first detected in a city called Foshan which is close to Hong Kong. Years later scientists were able to trace the likely origin to a cave of bats in Yunnan province 150 km to the west. It's almost exactly as far from Foshan as it is from Wuhan.

    The cave is in a rural region populated by ethnic minorities such as the Yi and Dai people who were living there long before the Peoples' Republic of China ever existed. There is some pretty amazing scenery such as this:


    It's also just north of the "Golden Triangle" where the borders of Thailand, Myanmar and Laos meet which is the source of much of the world's drug smuggling.

    The local people are working on farms, eating wild animals and probably seeing a lot of bats flying over their village at night. The interesting thing is that virologists apparently tested the locals and discovered that some of them had antibodies to certain other strains of bat coronavirus, in spite of none of them having any memory of being sick.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc…

    I don't think the lab leak theory can be ruled out. Because after this discovery, virologists sampled viruses from bats in this region and brought them back to study in Wuhan.

    However it would be equally dangerous to ignore the reality that viruses can just naturally spill over undetected from animals to humans in an area like this, and then cause an outbreak in a city hundreds of kilometers away. After all this is exactly what happened with the original SARS in 2002.

    yuekit 2Permalink
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    • Makes sense, that general area has the worlds lowest cases of covid so maybe they have built up an immunity over the years by being exposed to similar strains_niko
    • Exactly...we just watched a second outbreak happen in Thailand and now it is fizzling out again just like the first one. Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam alsoyuekit
    • have almost no cases, in spite of almost non-existent healthcare in the first two countries. Of course that doesn't necessarily prove anything but it'syuekit
    • an interesting correlation at the very least.yuekit
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