• Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]
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    4 years ago

    "Don't be ridiculous, the fact that it was already customary to wear masks when you get sick in East Asian countries is completely irrelevant, now bring me my calipers, I have real work to do. "

  • Reversi [none/use name]
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    4 years ago

    Expect "coronavirus was made in a Chinese lab" to become "coronavirus was designed in a Chinese lab to target white people" soon enough

    • Wheaties [comrade/them]
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      4 years ago

      Didn't a research paper recently find the virus was circulating in Italy and France before the Wuhan outbreak?

      • Reversi [none/use name]
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        4 years ago

        I recall there being something about the virus being present in Europe earlier than previously thought, but I don't know about pre-Wuhan. I'm probably misremembering.

        • Wheaties [comrade/them]
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          4 years ago

          Did a lookup, this article says the Italian tests go back as far as September 2019. Wikipedia says the virus was first identified in December.

          https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-italy-anitbodies-covid-study-b1723243.html

            • gammison [none/use name]
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              4 years ago

              Yeah that's most likely gonna be retracted, seen nothing corroborating it, also just doesn't make sense for the virus to be circulating without spikes in deaths. So many wacky papers have been published, ran in the news cycle, then forgotten about. It's gonna take a year of peer review for the real stuff to float to the top and there be consensus.

                • gammison [none/use name]
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                  4 years ago

                  I doubt it, it's so virulent that if it was present in a small number of people it would have kicked off mass spread. IMO the most likely thing is that since coronaviruses recombine very often compared to other virus families, that the tests for covid 19 are picking up other coronaviruses. Plus the genetically most similar viruses have been found to be bat viruses in nearby provinces to Wuhan. It also spread from a bat to pangolin then back to bats to humans very very recently, so it had to be somewhere with a pangolin population.

      • evilgiraffemonkey [he/him]
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        4 years ago

        Here's a good thread of all the possible evidence of covid in europe before China's first confirmed case

  • DrSan [none/use name]
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    4 years ago

    By sheer coincidence all of the white people with covid resistant genes live in New Zealand

    • pooh [she/her, any]
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      4 years ago

      Also Norway, Finland, and Slovakia, to name a few others.

  • GottaJiBooUrns [they/them]
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    4 years ago

    The virgin 6 month Moderna antibodies versus the chad 25,000 year old epigenetic imprinting

  • gammison [none/use name]
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    4 years ago

    Makes literally no sense on any level, even if there were a coronavirus pandemic that long ago people were so migratory that there's significant overlap between European and East Asian populations from that era even if they generally split 40 ish thousand years ago. I can believe there'd be markers of repeated coronavirus pandemics in one population, but see no reason for the immunity of a novel coronavirus to be significantly different from other Eurasian populations. Like variola family viruses such as smallpox spread all over Eurasia for thousands of years (though smallpox itself is relatively recent), as did coronaviruses. Wait for peer review on that paper.

    EDIT: okay I checked the paper a bit and a guy in the replies of that tweet is right, their confidence intervals are crazy. And nowhere in the paper did it say a causal relationship was established between what they’re measuring here and modern day Covid-19 resistance.

    • Ho_Chi_Chungus [she/her]
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      4 years ago

      But doesn't a lack of melanin make white people slightly more adept at generating vitamin D from the sun?

      • deadbergeron [he/him,they/them]
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        4 years ago

        Yeah fair skin is an adaptation to an environment with less sun. It’s not only europeans, people who come from more northern latitudes will generally have fairer skin than people closer to the equator (since closer to the equator sun protection is more important than vitamin d absorption). The Inuit however often have darker skin than would be expected that far north, since their diet consists of mostly seafood, a high source of vitamin d. So they don’t need to get it from the sun.

        That’s my understanding at least

        • Ho_Chi_Chungus [she/her]
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          4 years ago

          Ohhhh, I thought the Inuit had more melanin because they live in a place where they might have to deal with 6 months of constant sunlight with little cloud cover. But that makes more sense now

          • Amorphous [any]
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            4 years ago

            I thought it was because you're basically getting a double dose of sunlight when you're hanging out in the snow all the time, since the sun reflects back off the snow.

            Which is definitely a real issue, but I guess it might not be why they're darker skinned.

            • gammison [none/use name]
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              4 years ago

              It's more that darker skin was never selected against, so if the people settling the area had dark skin to begin with then if there was no pressure to lose it, they would not. If their diet supplied vitamin D, then there's no reason people with darker skin would be selected against.