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New COVID-19 comment: Species distribution models are a great tool, but wrong for a respiratory virus. Here's an explainer of where ecologists went wrong, and why we have to stop right now, before people get killed.

New in Nature Ecology and Evolution:
nature.com/articles/s4155…
Thanks to @joechip90 @BlasBenito @richardjtelford @BobOHara and Nature Ecology & Evolution for working around the clock to get this out there (and to the journal for making it open access).
Bottom line:

Using SDMs for a system like COVID-19 is malpractice, deeply indicative of a lack of understanding about microbiology.

Pushing studies out anyway against the advice of public health experts, at great risk to the public, is careerist misconduct.

End of discussion.
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Colin J. Carlson, Ph.D.
@wormmaps
Let's say that after COVID-19, you wanted to discover every single animal virus that can make a person sick, from Aichi to Zika.

How many are there?
How long would it take?
A little thread for a quiet night.
When you walk into a party, you meet the most strangers early in the night; the longer you’re there, the fewer new people you’re likely to meet, and the more repeats you hit.

Ecologists usually measure diversity the same way, using what they call “rarefaction curves.”
Every year, about 2-4 new animal viruses that can infect humans – zoonotic viruses – are discovered. Even though we’re being hit by more virus outbreaks every year, we started hit a plateau in zoonotic virus discovery over the 20th century.
Read 21 tweets
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Colin J. Carlson, Ph.D.
@wormmaps
Can I talk to the public as a modeler for a second?

I've been training for something like this for 10 years. I've been doing outreach, posting, publishing and now I'm asking you:

Don't listen to modelers right now. Don't try to understand the full range of good and bad science.
Normally, there's a bell curve of good and bad science - some really brilliant work, some really confused work - but it all sort of approximates the truth like a shotgun blast.

Right now, every single person with my training is doing this work. I can't even keep up with it.
What that means is that every now and then, there's going to be a paper that says something like "Africa won't be hit by COVID because it's too hot" or "10 million Americans were infected weeks ago and the disease isn't severe."

I promise it is, really, as bad as it seems.
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Colin J. Carlson, Ph.D.
@wormmaps
Today, the U.S. extended a program, defunded last year, to stop pandemics by studying wildlife viruses.

For today's very first issue of Lancet Microbe, I've written about USAID PREDICT, why it was important, and why it wasn't enough to stop COVID-19:

thelancet.com/journals/lanmi…
I want to add a few points of nuance that I wish had made it into this, starting with the fact that today, the program was extended for 6 months / $2.26 million budget, focused on
1. COVID-19 diagnostics, and
2. Tracing wildlife origins of SARS-CoV-2

ucdavis.edu/coronavirus/ne…
Even before this announcement, PREDICT-funded labs around the world (esp. Africa and Asia) have already been pivoted to COVID diagnostics.

I'm optimistic that the capacity building aim of PREDICT will pay off in this crisis.
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