Thread by @soychicka

That said, unless the primary nexus of transmission was in health care settings, 70% prevalence of a more virulent, derived strain over the ancestral, milder strain is not how things work.

At least not via natural selection...

academic.oup.com/nsr/advance-ar…

https://twitter.com/ericgarland/status/1235608228479803395

In nature, strains of viruses that kill or severely inhibit the activities of the host tend to spread less across the population less quickly.

In contrast, viral strains with a lower impact on the host organism - sniffles, not fever - actually enhances the risk of transmission.

IOW, if you hurt your host, you're less likely to survive, thus less likely to reproduce, thus less likely to spread.

Don't hurt your host & you're able to increase your exposure to new hosts, transmission permitting increasing reproductive fitness - that's how NatSel rolls.

For comparison, think about it in terms of epimemeology:

mild, sophmoric memes that use subtext to perpetuate white nationalist ideology within an ingroup are usually ignored by social media platforms,

social media platforms don't take them down when reported, as there is plausible deniability that they're being "misinterpreted" by those reporting them - making them an ideal tool to reinforce themes in public among those indoctrinated elsewhere.

In contrast, a video of a lynching would put the message across clearly to ALL viewers, but its lack of ambiguity would instantly allow it to be classified as hate speech and removed instantly; w/o plausible deniability, a failure to act would -> in harm to the host...

be it the imposition of regulations, lawsuits, etc.

Internet trolls and social media platforms realize this, and allow the low-grade sniffles to profligate across the platform, benefiting both the continued subtextual spread of subversive ideologies in public & platform user #s.

But, back to the main topic...

I don't have enough data yet to make any generalized statements about the origin and/or spread of COVID-19...

But I can say that this statement contradicts pretty much everything known about 'natural selection.'

But that one individual can become infected with both strains is another freakish sign that something weird is going on here... immunity to one strain of a virus often precludes susceptibility to later or concurrent infections from a different strain...

and if there are only two underlying polymorphisms determinately linked to the 'aggressiveness' of the types, (though the L strain has a higher background μ, it seems, which could make sense for a derived, non-stable strain)....

That the two strains pop up at the same time, even coinfecting one individual who goes overseas?

something just doesn't smell right here.

p.s. Here's a link to a genomic alignment for the currently available COVID-19 genomic sequences and known associates., if you're interested.

Note the insertions from the basal bat viruses, spike enables targeting of ACE2 receptor.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/msavi…