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A comment on Covid 'fuse' may have been lit weeks or months before the 'bomb' in Wuhan market. Parent comment

Re:Covid 'fuse' may have been lit weeks or months before the... by SiempreViernes on Wednesday March 31, 2021 @08:39AM (#26646466)
Extending the timeline from the first case to the first detected outbreak doesn't strengthen the theory though? If anything a longer timeline means more time for the virus to travel to Wuhan from somewhere else...

Anyway, the early cases that most closely match the supposed bat-virus ancestor aren't even from the same province as the Wuhan virus lab.

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Re:Covid 'fuse' may have been lit weeks or months before the... by yorwba on Wednesday March 31, 2021 @08:47AM (#26646563)
> the early cases that most closely match the supposed bat-virus ancestor aren't even from the same province as the Wuhan virus lab.

Which province were they from? I know that related samples were found in bat guano from Yunnan province, but I've never heard of earlier human cases in another province.

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Re:Covid 'fuse' may have been lit weeks or months before the... by SiempreViernes on Wednesday March 31, 2021 @09:14AM (#26646833)
Not earlier but rather just some of the early cases.

The precise timeline of the outbreak is in any case very sketchy due to the natural circumstance that nobody was testing for it before the Wuhan outbreak, but of course the first time you find something doesn't have to be the first time you could have found it.

In https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2004999117 they report that (at the time) the known samples closest to the bat progenitor were collected 3-4 weeks after the outbreak was declared, and could be connected to a cluster (cluster A) of cases connected to Guangdong detected starting from two weeks after the outbreak.

It's important to highlight that while these cases were picked up later and outside of Wuhan, the genetics of the viruses were closer to the supposed ancestral bat virus, so in some sense this is a sample of an "earlier" part of the epidemic.

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Re:Covid 'fuse' may have been lit weeks or months before the... by JulianMorrison on Wednesday March 31, 2021 @08:55AM (#26646632)
They probably won't be found. Needle in a haystack problem, compounded by the fact most Covid cases are minor and the major ones just look like atypical pneumonia if you don't know what to look for.
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