If a person and an animal are in a room and you find infectious virus on surfaces in that room, how can you distinguish whether the virus was shed by the person or the animal?
We've been spending most of the pandemic worrying about fomite transmission (getting infected by touching surfaces or objects) and disinfecting the **** out of our workspaces.

Isn't the underlying assumption that sick people are shedding infectious virus onto surfaces?
A study of the Diamond Princess cruise hit by Covid-19 found that virus RNA "was identified on a variety of surfaces in cabins of both symptomatic and asymptomatic infected passengers up to 17 days after cabins were vacated on the Diamond Princess..."
cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/6…
Experts were so concerned about surface transmission of SARS2 that they conducted studies to see how long the virus could survive and remain infectious on various materials, including library books - no one is imagining a natural spillover in a library.
oclc.org/realm/research…
Reported by @nature news: "viable virus was present on skin for up to 4 days, but on clothes it survived for less than 8 hours. And others found infectious virus on library books bound in natural and synthetic leather after 8 days..."
nature.com/articles/d4158…
@Nature If you find infectious virus on surfaces in a library, a cruise, or a market where a human superspreader event had occurred, it doesn't mean there was a raccoon dog shedding virus in these places.

You have to check for animals infected with the virus.
Although by 22 Jan 2020, the Chinese authorities had announced that SARS2 most likely came from wildlife illegally sold at Huanan seafood market... by end of Jan, they were reporting to the @OIEAnimalHealth that they had found zero SARS2+ animal samples at the market.
Some believe that, despite extensive powers and advanced tech, the Chinese authorities & scientists were not able to track down the proximal animal source of the virus at these markets or any of their suppliers.

They're saying all of the farmers+traders outsmarted their gov.

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More from @Ayjchan

3 Oct
Why has the DEFUSE EcoHealth x WIV document not hit the mainstream?

The public needs to know there was a pipeline for genetically modifying novel SARS-like coronaviruses as part of an international collaboration involving the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The biggest reason as far as I can see is that the largest news outlets refuse to run stories once they lose the exclusive.

This makes little sense to me because what % of people are following the Twitter users tweeting about DEFUSE?
The DEFUSE story was so close to being in a big newspaper but got pulled last minute when it was dropped on Twitter.

This is a disservice to the public and to the documents and the whistleblower.
Read 6 tweets
2 Oct
The documents FOIA’ed or leaked in the past month have shown us that there is a lot of info relevant to #OriginsOfCovid still being withheld even outside of China. Many FOIAs are still in progress, and it could take years before those emails and documents are finally released.
It’s troubling that the individuals sitting on these documents don’t have knowledge or access to a secure whistleblower channel, or in some cases they appear not to even understand the impact of the info they’re sitting on and their decision not to make public what they know.
If, in Jan 2020, the world was informed of the DEFUSE proposal and that scientists don’t know whether the virus came from a market or a lab, there’s a possibility we could’ve ended this pandemic before it got so out of control.
Read 5 tweets
28 Sep
Virologists claiming SARS-CoV-2 spilled over at multiple markets are, imo, unintentionally, participating in a disinformation campaign.

It has been repeatedly clarified that the market the earliest "known" covid case visited was a Walmart-equivalent RT-mart. Not a wet market.
Please see page 38 of the China-WHO annexes.

This superstore market that the first case was brutally exposed to was *GASP* in the same district as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
who.int/docs/default-s…
Yet, journalists are still reporting misinformed experts as saying that they're stunned that a lab escape virus would make its way to a market/superstore.

Do some scientists no longer buy their own groceries? How do you expect Wuhan scientists to get food to cook and eat?
Read 11 tweets
26 Sep
Both #OriginsOfCovid study committees with strong ties to EcoHealth Alliance & WIV have finally been disbanded.

As many are aware by now, there are plentiful opportunities outside China to collect information about the early days of the outbreak in Wuhan.
wsj.com/articles/who-s…
"The previous WHO-selected team.. recommended that their Chinese counterparts analyze blood banks, test farmworkers and further scrutinize the earliest suspected cases.. China hasn’t said whether it has undertaken such work. The original WHO team has been disbanded."
If there are any people out there who believe China would not do everything in its power to rapidly identify the source of a killer virus in one of its top cities, with or without the recommendations of foreign experts...
Read 8 tweets
26 Sep
I imagine some scientists are now praying that one of the most well-funded, prolific, cutting-edge labs in the world suddenly didn’t have the will, funding or ingenuity to follow through and expand on the SARSr-CoV engineering ideas they proposed in early 2018. #OriginsOfCovid
This is an astute observation by @zeynep

The more senior authors and signatories of @TheLancet letters and the Holmes et al. @CellCellPress paper should be approached for extended comment on the EcoHealth proposal.
To do that, we really need the best of the best journalists to cover this story. @theintercept @fastlerner @MaraHvistendahl @maiahibbett and @TheAtlantic @danengber have made valiant efforts to authenticate the document and to juxtapose arguments from experts on both sides.
Read 9 tweets
25 Sep
“The pattern here is unmistakable: At every turn, what could be important information has been withheld.”

“scientists agree that the very fact that these experiments were even on the radar raises significant concerns”

Good to see minds changing. theatlantic.com/science/archiv…
I don’t think the window for possible work on a SARS2 precursor was that narrow (early 2018 to fall 2019) @acritschristoph

We don’t know when the preliminary work on FCS detection in deep sequencing data had been conducted and when a precursor might have been found.
Thanks to painstaking work by @franciscodeasis we know that we have near zero insight to the viruses sampled by the WIV after 2015. And their entire database is missing. We also have no access to their deep sequencing data which wouldn’t regularly be uploaded to databases.
Read 8 tweets

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