Thought of the Day - November 20 - One Year Anniversary

It has been a year since the first identified people died from the then unnamed SARS-CoV2 virus and associated COVID-19 disease. According to a report from the Chinese government, the first case can be traced back to 17 November 2019; the person was a 55-year old citizen in the Hubei province. There were four men and five women reported as infected from the area in November 2019. Subsequent reports also talk about cases in Europe in 2019, such as the infamous Algerian-born Fishmonger in France in December. But is clear none of these are "patient zero".

It has been nearly three months since I last talked about the search for the origin ( Thought of the Day - August 31 - Update On the Source ). Diving back in I see that on November 5th the WHO publish an eight-page report entitled Global Study of the Origins of SARS-CoV-2. I eagerly read it. It is dated July 30. It is the report that Tedros said would not be produced from the work way back in July, which was only done to plan the plan.

The report talks quite a bit about how much we don't know. For example the possibility, based on sewage evidence, the virus started elsewhere other than Wuhan, and that it may have been in circulation earlier in 2019 ( Thought of the Day - July 6 - Oh-Shi-ooot ). It says from a zoonotic [from animals] perspective "there is no evidence to demonstrate the possible route of transmission from a bat reservoir to human through one or several intermediary animal species" and "So far, susceptibility studies conducted in several countries have shown that domestic cats, ferrets, hamsters and minks ( Thought of the Day - June 12 - Mink ) are particularly susceptible to infection". This was all current thinking as of the beginning of the summer.

The report concludes with a plan:

• Phase 1: Short term studies will be conducted to better understand how the virus might have started circulating in Wuhan.

• Phase 2: Building on the findings of these short-term studies, and the scientific literature, longer term studies will be developed.

There is no timeline, and as the report was just published earlier this month still says Final Draft it is unlikely that Phase 1 has even started.

So here we are one year after and no further ahead, not just in knowledge surrounding the origin, but in a real plan to find it. No wonder conspiracy theories still abound.

Cheers

Cliff