Covid starting in Italy tests, page-184

I think that you are not applying good sense to be honest. What if Spain investigated further based on their sampling for a start. this is in the same category as people having a go at antivaxxers because they aren’t looking at the right data, paying attention to experts in the tfield or are just plain regarded as opinionated. Your source of this story has no degree at all let alone in epidemiology, genetics, or medical demographics. and he goes against the view of the Italians who did the study on which he has developed his theory - copyu and all

Why accept his as a reasonable proposition and yet reject others?

I think you have a much more complex situation than you think. what i know (and I will know a great deal less than experts who have been working on this for over a year or more by now).

italy tested samples and found evidence of COVID19 in the last quarter of 2019. But, first cases were 31 January 2020, when two Chinese tourists in Rome tested positive for the virus.

One week later an Italian man repatriated back to Italy from the city of Wuhan, China, was hospitalised and confirmed as the third case in Italy.

Clusters of cases were later detected in Lombardy and Veneto on 21 February, with the first deaths on 22 February.

By the beginning of March, the virus had spread to all regions of Italy and cases were linked back to the two key outbreaks in Lombardy

China reported an unusual cluster of people being unwell with pneumonia at the end of December 2019 and by mid January had isolated and shared the genetic profile of the virus with the scientific community

There is satellite and intelligence information from Harvard that suggests well before December there had been a notable uptick in hospital visits in Wuhan.

there were world military games held in Wuhan in October and subsequently a number of athletes experienced symptoms parallel to COVID symptoms. However at that time they would have been regarded as isolated examples of pneumonia and without the genetic code and the China alert there would have been no way - or thought - of looking for connections between these apparently isolated events

another study in Italy has looked at the genetic codes of COVID in Italy and identified that some strains are not the Wuhan strain. However they appear to be linked to other parts of Europe so while the authors said they appeared to have originated in Italy their lineage looks as though it traces to larger Europe


https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20688-x

this article however does NOT suggest that Lombardy was the original source but notes circulation of multiple strains and immigration/travel patterns. I suggest that if people draw a conclusion other than the one by the scientists they are ill equipped to do so without the actual research

we know the virus mutates with multiple strains and this has been a useful mechanism to track the source of outbreaks and identify links and possible spread. so all that knowing that there were distinct Lombardy strains does is the equivalent of knowing that there are versions from India and South America.

copyu - the supposed intermediary was most definitely not a favoured food source in Lombardy and was consumed in the US and Russia well before Italians started treating it as a fancy food source (use the marketing trick of up marketing something that is actually a pest). Copyu are found round the world as the result of the fur trade.

Lombardy has a high concentration of Chinese immigrants and due to their passport habits may well have had a substantially larger population than the official count. These people made regular trips back and forth to China

china has provided no data from prior to their December 2019 announcement.

there were super spreader events in Austria and later Italy in france on the ski fields

so what are logical conclusions
that we don’t really know when COVID made the jump to humans whatever it’s origin.

we don’t know it’s actual origin nor the original transmission pattern

that the virus may have existed in a much milder and less aggressive form for a long time before it mutated to the varietal that so significantly impacted Wuhan first and then other parts of Europe.

the Chinese appear to have been better at noticing patterns and doing something about it but even they didn’t realise the problem when it first emerged.

either the Italians are less competent at identifying clusters of symptoms than the Chinese (possible) or the conclusions of an Italian origin are unjustified. But then france may have had earlier cases as well.

speed of response was relevant as well as the type of response. Despite the other ravings that france handled it well it is actually only in comparison to some other European countries. That is hardly a recommendation.

to suggest that no one else has looked at the origins and considered Italy is arrogance. They clearly have and those that have done so have not drawn the same conclusion. We are back to the same question you pose for others on other matters. Do you believe scientists and those who have spent years honing their skills and have the education and knowledge to back it or do you believe a hotcopper poster who is fixated because no one ever listens to him?

if the latter then I’d be curious as to your reasons. And I actually mean that for real because I am fascinated by the way our beliefs form