Thread by @Ayjchan

For people who need a crash course in how the animal (zoonotic) origin of the first SARS virus was found, please read this short review written by Linfa Wang, Shi Zhengli, Peter Daszak and colleagues in 2006:

wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/12…

Note that they had not yet found the ancestral bat reservoir a long way away in Yunnan province (only published in 2017).

But it was clear SARS1-like viruses were circulating widely in the animal trading community (animals & humans) in Guangdong province where SARS broke out.

For SARS2, it’s the reverse.
When it broke out in Wuhan, we already knew where it’s ancestral reservoir was very likely to be. A virus genome matching 96% was already under study in a Wuhan lab. Collected from a mine after miners had sickened with a SARS-like pneumonia.

On the other hand, there was no sign of an animal trade leading to the ferrying of SARS2-like viruses into Wuhan, which is far north of the subtropical SARS spillover zone in China.

In other words, the animal trading conduit and the frequent spillover of SARS1 in Guangdong is well established.

For SARS2, we literally have nothing. No conduit, no positive animal samples, no evidence of SARS2-like viruses being introduced into the city or even Hubei province.

I know people say, “Wuhan is a major transit hub!”

You’re saying that one of the rare times a SARS-like virus is introduced to Wuhan, it was also a pandemic-level pathogen.

Please calculate the probabilities of that.

And not only was it a pandemic-level pathogen that decided to break out in the city in China where the lab studying its closest relatives were..

It left absolute zero trace of its journey from the SARS spillover zone in China.

Early cases had to have fizzled out.

Check it out. By October 2003 Chinese scientists had already published their findings. 73% of animal traders who traded civets had antibodies against SARS despite not being diagnosed as SARS cases during the epidemic.
cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/m…