Within about half a day of downloading the data from GISAID, the trio and their collaborators discovered that several market samples that tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 were also coming back chock-full of animal genetic material—much of which was a match for the common raccoon dog, a small animal related to foxes that has a raccoon-like face. Because of how the samples were gathered, and because viruses can’t persist by themselves in the environment, the scientists think that their findings could indicate the presence of a coronavirus-infected raccoon dog in the spots where the swabs were taken.
The findings don’t rule out the possibility that other animals may have been carrying SARS-CoV-2 at Huanan. Raccoon dogs, if they were infected, may not even be the creatures who passed the pathogen on to us. Which means the search for the virus’s many wild hosts will need to plod on. “Do we know the intermediate host was raccoon dogs? No,” Andersen wrote to me, using the term for an animal that can ferry a pathogen between other species. “Is it high up on my list of potential hosts? Yes, but it’s definitely not the only one.”
Is that funnier than Wuhan Coronavirus Lab workers getting infected in the lab, then going shopping at the market and infecting a bunch of people and, coincidentally, a bunch of poor racoon dogs being illegally sold for meat?
Good luck. I had a cold that started last weekend and lasted about 4 days. Nose ran like a faucet, which is super annoying when wearing a mask and only able to blow every 30 mins at work. Tested negative a couple times for covid though thankfully. Every time I get sick now the anxiety definitely is higher.
Well I have a low-grade fever and chills. COVID test gonna be hard to take with the shivering since it’s the one that goes way up the nose.
No cough though. Sore throat, mild headache and head congestion.
When I had COVID it was the opposite of this where I had none of these symptoms but occasionally coughed and had a runny nose. This is more like the flu-like thing I had around March last year after spring break (though this time it’s during it).
My face is bright red despite the cold Kosovar weather and I still feel feverish. However, my temperature is now normal and I don’t have chills thanks to the cold/flu meds I took.
Hopefully, I wake up and I’m okay tomorrow. I don’t have any trips planned like I did in most of the previous days this past week. So, it’ll be a decent day to recover.
But the evidence was there before. If you didn’t find it convincing then, how could a new piece of evidence retroactively make you feel that you should have found the old evidence more convincing than you did?
This particular piece of evidence is interesting in that it isn’t really “new,” it just seems to have been covered up until now. So if you had doubts about zoonosis on the grounds that there was suspiciously little direct evidence for it, that suspicion is actually kind of validated.
Dr Jonathan Stoye, a virologist and senior group leader at the Francis Crick Institute in London, said: “The finding of Sars-CoV-2 infected racoon dogs strengthens the plausibility that coronavirus-infected farmed animals were an important link in the series of events leading to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“However, it does not disprove lab-leak theories: that would require the demonstration that such animals were infected prior to their arrival and display at the Huanan seafood market, something that may never be possible.”
Churchill as a hw assignment look into the control and tell me why this study was nearly always going to result in a failure to find an association
(Hint: the way they decided someone was in the control group in no way disproved they had covid. They needed a single negative test at some point. Combine that with an exceptionally rare disease, retrospective chart reviews always sucking, that they only tested people who survived and the fact you’re likely going to swab negative in this chronic period still, and yeah ofc the study is negative.)
Who’s injecting people with live viruses? I may have missed something. COVID vaccine is just bits of mRNA your body turns into bits of virus protein as I understand it.
