This country would have had far different results if 70 percent had chosen to distance and mask. Nobody was (or is) stopping us.
Part of the problem is simply that needed course of action is so mundane. An early cartoon had Superman.sitting in a chair watching TV. His wife urges him to do something about the Pandemic. He replies: I am.
I’ve not seen any data I trust on that point. Not saying you are wrong, I just have not seen what I would normally need to see to “know”. So far it’s anecdotal. If it were lab origin then the early genomic data would show it. And why look at a coronavirus like this one in a lab in the first place? It would make a lousy weapon that we see cannot be controlled when loose. Of course there are labs in Wuhan, it’s a big city after all at just near 12 million people.
Yes it was loose in January 2020 and probably global by then. It got loose likely in November 2019.
I don’t absolve the Chinese leadership or trump.
Did any of your “normally hearty folks” get tested for antibody before vaccination once the tests were available? I would have out of curiosity had I had “The worst flu ever” at that time. That antibody test would be diagnostic.
It’s easy to say all these officials should have resigned in protest. That would have been the easy way out. Just think for a moment about the incompetent quacks who would have replaced them, or even IF they’d be replaced.
It’s not easy to be forced to deal with a narcissistic boss. They demand constant praise and flattery, When not provided, they make life absolute hell. And Donald John Trump exceeds with all the abhorrent traits. These good people did what they could, I’m sure, to mitigate the damage. They do not deserve all this condemnation.
Nice hypothesis. Are you currently engaging in any scientific study examining the differential rates of distancing and making in Canada versus the United States? I ask because that’s the sort of thing anybody would need to be doing in order for me to care about their opinion on the subject.
That’s why the lab keeps popping up as the most likely suspect. They were literally studying coronaviruses in bats there.
The source cave of the likely bat that made the jump is about 1100km away, based on previous known samples with very high genome matches coming from there.
Had the virus been released from the source, should have had an exposure chain that leads back there, not one which leads back to a city with a level 4 biolab that was literally studying coronaviruses in bats.
I’d stake a lot of money that it’s natural in origin, true, but that a lab worker got an accidental needle stick while working with specimens.
Just go post-breakout, once lockdowns started, and chart the red-blue gap. Places like Vermont largely kept it at bay, places like Florida, a little less so.
No but my observation is thatbthebAsuan countries which instituted such measures along with testing did much.better than we did prior to.the availability of vaccines. I might well be off on the percentage required but the basic point is that the voluntary dreary means of beating this virus were in the hands of everybody from the beginning this thing and not enough people chose to do so.
Very logical presentation. Where could I look for further data on the cave? That would lead me to the genome data that I could then compare to what the Chinese published in mid January 2020. I did take a look at that data at that time. I thought then it was impressive that they got the full genome and published the data three weeks from the time they announced the presence of this virus in Wuhan
To get loose, even from the scenario you describe, the virus would need a series of very lucky interventions to really get going. Like, for example, it’s ability to be asymptomatic in young folk and yet be transmissible.
This is a good read, at least for laypeople like me, on the genome progression. The big conclusion in there was that there was a single jump, one time, from animal to human. Aligns much better with a lab accident than with a group of farmers handling something.
And here’s the BBC on what happened when they tried to go to the cave (which previously was the source of SARS, and was why the lab was studying these things in the first place). Hint: the Chinese weren’t very subtle about blocking anyone from getting near the place.
Part II in the Birx/Trump has-been contest of point-counterpoint.
Here’s how donald has countered Dr. Debi: This was in Huff Post this morning, and quoted from the Boston Globe…
"Dr. Birx is a proven liar with very little credibility left. Many of her recommendations were viewed as “pseudo-science,” and Dr. Fauci would always talk negatively about her and, in fact, would ask not to be in the same room with her. The States who followed her lead, like California, had worse outcomes on Covid, and ruined the lives of countless children because they couldn’t go to school, ruined many businesses, and an untold number of Americans who were killed by the lockdowns themselves. Dr. Birx was a terrible medical advisor, which is why I seldom followed her advice. Her motto should be “Do as I say, not as I do.” Who can forget when Dr. Birx gave a huge mandate to the people of our Nation to not travel, and then traveled a great distance to see her family for Thanksgiving—only to have them call the police and turn her in? She then, embarrassingly for her, resigned.
Finally, Dr. Birx says she can’t hear very well, but I can. There was no “very difficult” phone call, other than Dr. Birx’s policies that would have led us directly into a COVID caused depression. She was a very negative voice who didn’t have the right answers. Time has proven me correct. I only kept Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx on because they worked for the U.S. government for so long—they are like a bad habit!”
He even had to bring poor Tony Fauci into his petty tirade…
Thank you!
Also the results in the counties in Kansas that had a mask mandate versus those that did not.
Also, just for funsies, the lab has refused to release the list of genomes which they had sequenced or any other data which would support ruling them out of the running.
Every reason to blame Trump for fucking up the response and have plenty in reserve to blame China for having a lab accident and covering it all up.
Can just see the massive lawsuits that would come if they ever admitted to it, lots of reasons for them to prefer that something-anything- else get the blame.
Might there be any possibility that there could have been several sources where the virus could have been released? Instead of either/or (binary), could have been both, or even more?
Not from the evolution of the genomes linked above. Those point to a single source where it jumped species. As @darrtown notes, would take all of the “right” things for it to happen (e.g. right host/right bat), a chain of bad luck for that, so not at all surprising that it can be linked back to the one time that it “worked” (as opposed to the potential multiple exposures where something didn’t work, so the virus didn’t successfully jump).
Only question is where, exactly, that jump happened geographically.
Global supply chain being what it is, several infected critters on boats or planes could jump to humans in relative unison at various points far from their habitat.
ETA: and still Trump’s fault we had no boots on the ground in China to know if they had an accident.
Could, but then the genomes would point back to multiple sources. All the science dudes to date have said that all of the variants can be traced back to the initial exposure, which means a single point of transmission.
And absolutely no disagreement that trump deserves a heaping stack of blame on multiple levels for a failed response. But there’s more than one bad actor here.
Authoritarian regimes really suck at transparency, yep. Reminds me of the Chernobyl chain of command.
I’m not an expert in genomics/genetics. But I do not have it in me to trust binary assumptions, generally. Here is the research team and reporters I follow for all things related to Covid: (just as an fyi): Trevor Bedford (https://bedford.io/blog/archive), and STAT News (https://www.statnews.com/)
I’m a layperson as well, data analyst background, do definitely relying on what I’ve been able to read. From what I can glean from things, there’s basically a tiny tweak each time the virus hits a new host. That tweak allows them to trace with high confidence, the greater the sampling, from an original to its derivative replicants.
So like with the chicken vs egg, where one proto-chicken laid the egg with the mutation that became the current chicken (yes, this analogy has been conclusively solved), a single host had to make the transmission to a single human, who then spread tiny variants.