This is scary . . .
Via Noah Smith . . .
A relative of mine from China just sent me this. Rows of police surrounds her residential block where a positive #coronavirus case was found. It was someone who returned from #wuhan. Now their entire family has been taken away. The whole block is now sealed off until 16th Feb. pic.twitter.com/N3GulTWDlh
— Maree Ma (@maree_jun) February 2, 2020
they’re quarantined for 14 days. that means they’re doing it right.
Eric:
One would have to be familiar with how China does thing in order for this to have an impact on them. When the police come for you, it is not to ask questions. They are still trying to determine the source of this virus. It is an altered version of AIDs which may or may not have occurred naturally.
“It is an altered version of AIDs which may or may not have occurred naturally.”
No. It is a variant of Coronavirus. It has sequences that are highly related to sequences found in HIV and may or may not have occurred naturally. But there isn’t an atom of evidence that it causes immunodeficiency, and the route of transmission is entirely different.
Joel:
Thanks for stopping by. I was hoping you would offer your thoughts also.
“I took the four additional sequences (the “novel inserts”) they found in the coronavirus genome and I looked to see if, as they said, it was similar to HIV. The truth is while these sequences do pop up in HIV, they also pop up in tons of other viruses. There’s no reason to immediately suspect a nefarious fusion of HIV and coronavirus.
Sequence one out of four is indeed found in both Wuhan coronavirus and HIV. The same sequence also appears in a virus that infects Streptococcus (spherical bacteria), a rat virus, and an “acute bee paralysis virus.” ”
https://massivesci.com/notes/wuhan-coronavirus-ncov-sars-mers-hiv-human-immunodeficiency-virus/
Joel,
First, I completely agree with that article’s final sentence:
“And there’s definitely no proof that they were put there on purpose.”
Beyond that, his argument seems to be that the 4 segments could have come from 4 different sources instead of one.
But doesn’t that defy Occam’s razor? Especially since the 4 segments seem to pop up all at once.
If he is correct then where are the intermediate forms of the coronavirus?
Just curious.
@Jim,
I don’t understand why this is a violation of parsimony. These are apparently hypervariable regions in the viral genome. They are very short, too. As for the intermediate forms, we don’t know. It appears the virus was carried by bats, but may have infected an intermediate host before infecting humans.
Viruses aren’t a single thing, they are a population. DNA replication is intrinsically mutagenic, and viral DNA replication is more error-prone than your cells.
So given what we know, the violation of Occam’s razor is the assumption that these variants are man-made.
@Jim,
More details here, if you want.
https://theprepared.com/blog/no-the-2019-ncov-genome-doesnt-actually-seem-engineered-from-hiv/?fbclid=IwAR0XLMyKHkmV6G55K1eJO2b9KPu5J6XWYVRggomF2nj3AnFkAA8rGv8LUXE
Joel:
Thanks for all the info.
Joel,
So if I am reading you correctly, seeing 4 new segments in an already generally recognized coronavirus is NOT out of the ordinary.
Interesting.
Thanks.
@Jim,
Right. They are very short segments in a region of the viral genome notorious for variation.