https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935122013068
Many of you may recall a study from over two years ago which found traces of covid RNA in sewage water in Lombardy, Italy.
This is not that study. This is a study released this month which confirms those earlier findings. A new strain which predates the Wuhan alpha strain was sequenced, labeled proCoV2.
Abstract
As a reference laboratory for measles and rubella surveillance in Lombardy, we evaluated the association between SARS-CoV-2 infection and measles-like syndromes, providing preliminary evidence for undetected early circulation of SARS-CoV-2. Overall, 435 samples from 156 cases were investigated.
RNA from oropharyngeal swabs (N = 148) and urine (N = 141) was screened with four hemi-nested PCRs and molecular evidence for SARS-CoV-2 infection was found in 13 subjects. Two of the positive patients were from the pandemic period (2/12, 16.7%, March 2020–March 2021) and 11 were from the pre-pandemic period (11/44, 25%, August 2019–February 2020).
Sera (N = 146) were tested for anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG, IgM, and IgA antibodies. Five of the RNA-positive individuals also had detectable anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. No strong evidence of infection was found in samples collected between August 2018 and July 2019 from 100 patients. The earliest sample with evidence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA was from September 12, 2019, and the positive patient was also positive for anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies (IgG and IgM).
Mutations typical of B.1 strains previously reported to have emerged in January 2020 (C3037T, C14408T, and A23403G), were identified in samples collected as early as October 2019 in Lombardy. One of these mutations (C14408T) was also identified among sequences downloaded from public databases that were obtained by others from samples collected in Brazil in November 2019.
We conclude that a SARS-CoV-2 progenitor capable of producing a measles-like syndrome may have emerged in late June-late July 2019 and that viruses with mutations characterizing B.1 strain may have been spreading globally before the first Wuhan outbreak.
Our findings should be complemented by high-throughput sequencing to obtain additional sequence information. We highlight the importance of retrospective surveillance studies in understanding the early dynamics of COVID-19 spread and we encourage other groups to perform retrospective investigations to seek confirmatory proofs of early SARS-CoV-2 circulation.
I'm just waiting for it to be connected to the vaping illness epidemic that predated the Italian outbreak. The predominant symptom was "vape tongue" where you distinctly lose your smell and taste. I've never had another illness which so completely destroys those senses. Colds, influenza, pneumonia- it's dulled but not absent. Vape tongue was a sensory absence.
I could see it being just as plausible that the vaping was correlative rather than causative. Yes that's bad for your respiratory tract in general, yes the vitamin E acetate would be more so, but they wouldn't have been testing for COVID at the time and that's such a distinctive symptom of even mild COVID. The vaping could have just been one factor linking one demographic while others fell under vague pneumonia diagnoses.
I’ve been trying tell y’all it was :anti-italian-action: all along
So this is literally a repeat of the Spanish Flu where the only reason it got that name is because the Spanish were the first to mention it. Cool cool cool
This paragraph from the introduction is a good summary of all the evidence for the virus predating Wuhan.
Several lines of evidence suggest that SARS-CoV-2 had already been spreading unnoticed for some time prior to being recognized. In fact, SARS-CoV-2 RNA was detected in wastewaters in Northern Italy in late December 2019 (La Rosa et al., 2021) and in Brazil in November 2019 (Fongaro et al., 2021), and there is some indirect evidence of 2019 infections through antibody detection in France (Carrat et al., 2021), Italy (Apolone et al., 2020; Montomoli et al., 2022), UK (Ng et al., 2020), the USA (Basavaraju et al., 2021), and Angola (Paixao et al., 2022). In addition, SARS-CoV-2 RNA was detected as early as December 2019 in a respiratory sample from a French patient hospitalized for haemoptysis (Deslandes et al., 2020), in the oropharyngeal swab from a child from Milan (Lombardy) with suspected measles (Amendola et al., 2021), and in the blood and lungs of a patients that died in Milan because of acute circulatory insufficiency (Lai et al., 2022). Finally, viral antigens and RNA were detected in paraffin-preserved skin biopsies of a woman with dermatosis in November 2019 in Milan (Gianotti et al., 2021).
It sounds from this like SARS-CoV-2 was already more-or-less worldwide at low levels before the Wuhan outbreak that led to it being recognized.
Anecdotal, I know, but my partner had a mystery respiratory illness in the early months of 2019
Basically she was sick for about 15 weeks with all the symptoms of Covid (including loss of smell and taste), but the most information we were able to get out of any doctors was that "People kept coming in with her exact symptoms for weeks, but that they didn't know what it was because it was coming negative for flu and strep" and that was after we went to five different places
One of the scariest moments of my life, wouldn't doubt for a second our medical system didn't know its ass from its head about this until China figured it out
Validating my belief that even if covid definitively started in the US, our healthcare system is so garbage it never would have been caught in the first place.
Yes. Humanity is capable of anything at this stage in our development.
Maybe. I still think it came from the US, but the CDC refuses to test any samples from 2019 for covid because "there is no need". :sus-deep:
Source? I totally believe you I just want to be able to link it to other people and say “The US released covid”
If we could view old hexbear comments I could find it... >_<
What I'm specifically referring to is a tweet by a woman who had sent a letter to the CDC asking if they had tested any samples from EVALI patients for covid and she got a letter in reply stating that there was no need to test for the virus because they already know it wasn't here. Sounds like circular logic to me.
If you could try to do some googling i would like to see this. Couldn't find anything at a quick Google, but i never saw jt
I’ll let you pick up where I left off searching, I’m pretty sure it’s connected to this thread and this person somehow but I haven’t found it. https://twitter.com/Rossana38510044/status/1529050855005114368?s=20&t=lbM63pKSkLpZv3fyPm59MQ
The conspiracy-brained part of me suspects that the CDC at some level knows that covid came from Fort Detrick and that's why they're refusing to test those samples.
Why do you think they deliberately fumbled the approval of tests for months? They knew it was already widespread and needed plausible deniability.
As if we needed a reason to be angry at Italians :anti-italian-action:
Honestly, I don't love the anti Italian racism bit. It's like a Cumtown stay-behind joke. Not really funny, not even insightful, just enough post-irony to make isolating specific groups (Italians) seem ok, when it's like, not ok to be racist.
Good thing the word 'influenza' is already Italian. Somebody tried to warn us.
Hmm, kinda crazy that the whole world blames china partly because the doctor there jumped the gun reporting on it to the media. Maybe he shouldn't have done that.
Like people need an excuse to blame China for every problem in the world.
He didn't report it to the media, he talked about it on Slack with some of his colleagues, and got reminded by the cops not to do that.
He didn’t report it to the media, he talked about it on Slack with some of his colleagues, and got reminded by the cops not to do that.
IIRC he even got warned first by his job, fucked up again and then got warned by officials and apologized/agreed he was wrong to do so once the panic started. I remember (but couldn't confidently say I sourced it reliably) when he died (of covid, while treating people with covid) he was literally pro-party and wearing party badges on his hospital clothes.
Edit: There's also every chance I'm conflating multiple things or wrong or was in a fever dream with italian covid so take my word with literally pasta water that tastes like ocean amounts of grains of salt.
He was a CPC member, which is part of the reason why he got a reprimand, because if you're a Party member you are held to a higher standard of conduct. But yeah even if the word didn't get out and threaten a panic he was discussing patient details which is a pretty big violation.
But I remember looking into the badge thing, and it seems that that was a drawing of him (that might have been based on a photo but I couldn't find it), which a couple shit newspapers like the Daily Mail used while literally airbrushing out his CPC pin.
AFAIK on balance he's celebrated in China now as the face of the first responders who were lost in the early days of the pandemic, regardless of whatever mistakes he made.
Fair enough that all makes more sense than my memories of the event while still being completely logical as to how my recollection skewed. I'm pretty sure I only ever heard about the badge/pin thing BECAUSE the papers at the time being shitty and removing them came up so that makes sense.
There are better explanations in the other thread on my comment, but long story short, the doctor started talking about a pandemic before giving anyone involved in the government or the party a chance to strategize for the public, think about what's going on, gather more info, etc.
So it's Italian. That explains all the variants. Same
pastavirus different shapeIs it possible for COVID to falsely test positive as the normal flu? I had an absolutely gnarly flu in January of 2020 and everytime I see more reporting like this I think about it, but maybe it was just normal flu that hit me hard or something.
Me in late 2019: boy I sure do love pathologic, wonder what that would be like
The first detected covid samples were found in the US were from a flu study conducted in early 2020 in the Seattle area. In this case they just sent swabs to people with symptoms. They later retested the samples and found covid positive samples collected in late February, so it was almost certainly circulating before that, but anyone with covid would have assumed it was a flu or the worst cold of their lives.
Anecdotally, there was a lot of people reporting getting hit with a "cold from hell" in the Seattle area around that time.
We should have tested samples from any area in the world with higher than normal pneumonia rates in 2019, and there were several areas in the US where that was happening.
I know several people including myself who had the worst viral illness of our lives at the end of 2019 and it just seems too coincidental
Me and the Girlfriend caught a nasty "cold" around new years of 2020. didnt have any lower respiratory symptoms though.
What mechanism for contamination do you suggest here? They have found antibodies too. As far as I can see contamination is quite unlikely. This is the second study in the vein and they also found no evidence in samples before a certain time period. I really struggle to find any likely way this could be due to contamination.
Yeah unless they sprayed vaccine into the samples I don't see it being contaminated with antibodies. A sure sign of contamination would be seeing variants of COVID that have arisen more recently, but they didn't find that.
That's not sufficient. You need to also coincidentally not have any contamination for the samples outside the time period, and you need the control samples to still be negative, and of course you need the contamination to go in the same way for both ELISA and PCR.
That doesn't make sense. If you think that there is a general contamination in the lab, then it would be exceedingly unlikely to get a consistent negative result on all the samples before a given time period. And while one might think that RNA contamination could have happened at a coincidental time of testing to only happen for a sample past a certain date, for it to happen at the same point for the serological data is highly unlikely.
Also, ELISA is far less sensitive than a PCR test. Like, 3 orders of magnitude less. And RNA is far more stable than antibodies, too. So again, double contamination segmented cleanly around a coincidental points is massively unlikely.
Yes this is literally what I just mentioned in the comment you replied to. If this was a sequential contamination issue you would need contamination at the same point in time both for antibodies and RNA.
Sequencing the samples is something they say they want to do on the paper. It's not going to be easy at all to sequence these samples that are going to have RNA from thousands of other organisms.
Last I had seen bat's from Laos had the most similar genetics, is that not the case any more? I've more or less stopped watching, because I'm more of a macroevolution guy
One used geospatial statistics to identify the Wuhan market at the likely epicenter of the initial outbreak.
Fifteen professors co-signed a rebuttal letter to that one because they found it unconvincing. I also don't trust the motives of its author Kristian Andersen because he was caught playing underhanded in FOIA requests. I think he's an obfuscator.
If there were only one positive sample, I would agree. But this is 11 positive samples. And it conforms to sewage and antibody studies from across the globe. All samples from before September 2019 were negative.
Not to mention the spread of the virus prior to Wuhan is not supported by any genomic sequencing evidence.
Except for this study? They sequenced ProCov2.
So any chance we can convince the wikipedia nerds/feds to change the virus origin sections of the covid19 article to at least make the language much more neutral in regards to it's "origin" being Wuhan?
Given that this is a scientific journal directly disputing that. Or rather confirming previous evidence that disputed it.
The paper has serological data, though. PCR contamination wouldn't be enough.
Yes, that's exactly the issue. They consistently found negative results before a certain date, which makes this kind of contamination unlikely, especially across two different types of test that would require two different types of contamination. And while ELISA is sensitive, it's about 1000x less sensitive than rtPCR, and antibodies are far more fragile than RNA fragments.
I've mentioned processing time for contamination already and already touched on why it's still unlikely. The problem is that you need this time to concord between different tests
Again, what kind of contamination would work for this? Contamination for both antibodies and RNA is extremely unlikely. You'd need to mix samples or to sneeze on all of the equipment. And it still wouldn't work for the negative controls, as well as for the simply negative samples later on. I can understand RNA contamination because that happens easily enough since RNA fragments are relatively durable, but for simultaneous contamination with both, I don't see it.
They also shipped off an ELISA test to another lab, which gave concordant results. So really there would need to be persistent sample contamination or mixup. It's possible, but it's very unlikely, and this isn't the first study with these results.
Firstly, and I want you to know I'm asking this in good faith because I really am out of my depth entirely here so I'm not at all attempting to be combative, just seeking clarification, but:
Firstly doesn't it simply suggest the first CASE was recorded at the Wuhan market. Like, the crossing into humans doesn't contain anything wuhan specific right? We just up until this point assumed that was the site because it was the first recorded case as far as we know. In fact even that isn't true it seems, according to wikipedia.
In the earliest case, the patient became ill on 1 December 2019 and had no reported link to the seafood market, the authors report. "No epidemiological link was found between the first patient and later cases," they state. Their data also show that, in total, 13 of the 41 cases had no link to the marketplace. "That's a big number, 13, with no link," says Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Georgetown University.
Now again my understanding of this is incredibly shallow so I'm not proclaiming to be an expert in any way but it seems kinda weird to proclaim Wuhan was where it crossed into humans because the first cases were there but also earlier cases don't invalidate that because we know Wuhan was where it crossed into people because the first cases were there. If there's some specific marker or evidence that they're from there that doesn't rely on the "first reported case(s)" being the flag pole then fair enough, but if not then it seems to be some kind of orthodox circular justification, to me at least. (Or at least when challenged with alternate data that is just as reasonable if we assume the scientists are competent, which brings me to my next point)
Secondly, if we are just going to assume the samples were contaminated can't we just assume that about literally any sample? Doesn't any case for anywhere rely on us assuming the scientists are controlling for this?
I genuinely am trying to fill gaps in my own knowledge here so I hope I came off as earnestly asking for the sake of knowing and not the sake of debating or invalidating what you're saying in any way. o7
Hey sorry it took me so long to getting around to reading this between Christmas extended family obligations and a new job I just kinda didn't do anything but look at memes for a few days. Thank you very much for the explanation and that makes a lot of sense to consider it that way from a "It's not so much what X or Y proves it's that the model of best fit has a much larger body of evidence and upending that requires a bit more leverage than is really being pushed here but this might have some interesting implications if it continues to hold." kind of thing. I can very much understand the discussion a bit better from that lens even without specific biology knowledge, and does a decent job of answering that 'burden of proof' situation when you're not just challenging a finding but a lot of the other peripheral shit that only holds true if that finding does too.
I agree that the extra sticky bit of covid is that while I say we're supposed to act like these scientists are controlling for this shit because in my brain yeah, ideally, they would. However, gestures vaguely at the last three years of non stop fucking horse shit that doesn't seem to be the case as you mention at the end haha. It's hard to simultaneously want to give them the benefit of the doubt and know that like societally... nah. Nobody should be with the way we've handled covid, but at the moment that doesn't factor as much into the rest of the body of evidence this paper would be challenging so the first place to look for contamination would be here, not there.
Thanks for your time I appreciate you going the extra mile to re-frame it for me.
