Wuhan marks its anniversary with triumph and denial
www.bbc.com
In the city where the virus first emerged there is now an insistence that it came from elsewhere.

Favs included:

  • The West can't stop the virus because it has sooo much freedom!

  • OoOoOOoOoh what if the virus came from an spooky chinese lab

  • The chinese support their government (y'know the one that saved them from the virus while the west is still letting millions die a year later) therefore they are brainwashed

  • SonKyousanJoui [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Does anyone know the details about the evidence of the virus in Italy and Australia in autumn 2019? I'd like to know what justification they have for saying that

    such studies "lack validation" and some have been conducted without "the most basic controls"

    and then treating it as unworthy of further investigation

    • TheModerateTankie [any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Researchers find coronavirus was circulating in Italy earlier than thought

      The Italian researchers’ findings, published by the INT’s scientific magazine Tumori Journal, show 11.6% of 959 healthy volunteers enrolled in a lung cancer screening trial between September 2019 and March 2020 had developed coronavirus antibodies well before February.

      A further SARS-CoV-2 antibodies test was carried out by the University of Siena for the same research titled “Unexpected detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the pre-pandemic period in Italy”.

      It showed that four cases dating back to the first week of October were positive for antibodies, meaning they had got infected in September, Giovanni Apolone, a co-author of the study, told Reuters.

      and also:

      Italian researchers told Reuters in March that they reported a higher than usual number of cases of severe pneumonia and flu in Lombardy in the last quarter of 2019 in a sign that the new coronavirus might have circulated earlier than thought.

      • SonKyousanJoui [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Just read the other article you posted here, and it gives a good answer:

        it is possible, as the authors themselves acknowledge, that the tests are picking up another kind of antibody that, while similar, is distinct; coronaviruses are a large and relatively common family of virus, including some that can cause the common cold, leaving open the possibility that infection by a non-Covid-19 virus induced the positive test results

        So it's not irrefutably proven that it's covid-19. "Weird" though, how western media treats "proof isn't conclusive" as "there is no proof".

        • TheModerateTankie [any]
          ·
          4 years ago

          Exactly. Could have been something else causing these detections, but we can't rule it out.

          It's also pretty baffling to me (well not really, it's just western propaganda at work) that being able to detect a new virus in the middle of a flu season, that in most cases is indistinguishable from the flu, is presented as a sign of incompetence on China's part.

        • gammison [none/use name]
          ·
          4 years ago

          Yeah media bias is a fuck. It is highly likely it was a different antibody though tbh, but it still may have been in Italy a few weeks earlier than reported. Covid causes death spikes so quickly. There will probably be this year some study out on unaccounted pneumonia spikes in various places that will give more info on early outbreaks. The only for sure info I'm aware of we have from genetic sequencing on covid shows the two closest known viruses are a bat Coronavirus found in Yunnan, and a Coronavirus found in dead pangolins also in Yunnan. Getting more specific than that will require huge amounts of sampling various animals in the region.