Some conclusions from the WHO mission to China, nothing new really

- Virus came from bats, most likely via transmission of an in between (still unknown) other animal.
- It didn't start at the Seafood market (already known there were earlier cases) and it seems to be just an early cluster although the market did also sell domesticated animals "some of these animals have been traced to farms or traders in regions that are home to bats that carry the virus that is the closest known relative of the one that causes COVID-19." It could also have been transferred via frozen seafood, but most likely just through an already infected person (Chinese health officials note that only surfaces at the market tested positive for the virus, not any of the animal products. there were cases elsewhere in Wuhan around the same time as the market cluster)
- The lab theory just doesn't hold any ground, very unlikely
- The joint investigation left open the possibility that the virus could have been spread to humans through frozen food products, a bit of a surprise as foreign experts have generally played down the risk...


Anyway, still unknown where or how it started.

huh I thought it was becoming more and more mainstream to admit that the most likely origin was from a lab in china. You know the lab where virologists collected bat coronaviruses to carry out gain of function research... the same lab that just so happened to be in the region that was the first epicenter of the pandemic.

Does anyone actually trust the WHO especially given their track record of regurgitating ccp talking points and how controlled/delayed the "investigation" was yet somehow they were able to conclude that a lab origin was unlikely?? lol

Even Dr. Campbell knows...

https://youtu.be/hc9apjRpbgg?t=1092

More mainstream in the twitter sphere perhaps. Scientific sources have long ago ruled out lab produced virus and escape of bat samples is very unlikely and even more unlikely to directly infect anyone. A mutation needed to happen first in an intermediary animal and all signs point to it being a natural mutation.

What they mostly looked at is how it got to the market
https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2021/02/09/who-coronavirus-origin-wuhan-china-peter-daszak-interview-anderson-ctw-intl-ldn-vpx.cnn

The first identified case was already confirmed to have been on November 17th 2019, long before the market outbreak. And suspicion is that it was around in October already https://www.wsj.com/articles/possible-early-covid-19-cases-in-china-emerge-during-who-mission-11612996225

Which would explain how it got to Europe so early through the Military olympic games in Wuhan, after which many athletes reported they got sick. It was already in Italy in December, confirmed from waste water, around the same time it was discovered at the Seafood market.

There are thousands if not millions of times more people in direct contact with bushmeat than working at virus laboratories. People just want a strawman to beat, or perhaps things to be more exciting and cinematic than they are.

If you reject evolution theory, it becomes a lot harder to accept how viruses naturally pop up.

According to Google, bats make up 1/5th of the mammalian population It is estimated that there are 900 to over 1,200 species of bats in the world, making up one-fifth of Earth's total mammalian population, the second largest order after rodents. Now the virus is around in over 25 million currently infected, probably a lot more undetected on top of that. Constantly replicating with minor mutations, copy errors, while duplicating. No lab can compete with that.

It's now all but certain that Sars-Cov-2 will become endemic. Moving to the younger population (already happening) while becoming more virulent and less deadly. It might eventually end up less deadly than the flu. Of course there's also still a possibility a deadlier strain pops up, however more infectious less deadly strains have the best chance at survival, and will give people some immunity against a deadlier strain emerging.

The virus will live on, while losing its bite
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6530/741

One year after its emergence, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has become so widespread that there is little hope of elimination.

The transition from epidemic to endemic dynamics is associated with a shift in the age distribution of primary infections to younger age groups, which in turn depends on how fast the virus spreads. Longer-lasting sterilizing immunity will slow the transition to endemicity. Depending on the type of immune response it engenders, a vaccine could accelerate establishment of a state of mild disease endemicity.

Our analysis of immunological and epidemiological data on endemic human coronaviruses (HCoVs) shows that infection-blocking immunity wanes rapidly but that disease-reducing immunity is long-lived.

once the endemic phase is reached and primary exposure is in childhood, SARS-CoV-2 may be no more virulent than the common cold. We predict a different outcome for an emergent coronavirus that causes severe disease in children. These results reinforce the importance of behavioral containment during pandemic vaccine rollout, while prompting us to evaluate scenarios for continuing vaccination in the endemic phase.

The question is, will adding it to the regular vaccines received in early childhood be enough to keep it under control in the future, or will it need to be added to the seasonal flu shot.

For now

With so much of COVID-19's future still an open question, the experts agree, the best approach is to focus on tamping down overall virus activity, reducing its ability to spread and mutate.

"If we don't have COVID-19 under control … more variants will only lead to more virulent variants,"

Let the labs catch up to the virus. The vaccines will speed up natural evolution of the virus attempting to evade them.

I mean the plague is still around. All because those ignorants from the 14th century couldn't be bothered to vaccinate.

Is there a site that is tracking vaccine doses administered by country, similar to the trackers for number of dead and infected?

Everyday more people get vaccinated and hopefully that means we are just a little bit closer to ending the pandemic.

Weekly update, everyone got the message, cases are going down

In total 2.81 million new cases were reported last week (down from 3.29 million) bringing the total to 108,711,991
Another 84,975 people lost their lives to Covid-19 (down from 92,823) bringing the casualty total to 2,392,581

Good downward momentum all around, let's hope it continues

The continents

Europe reported 921K new cases (down from 1.08 million) and 30,416 more deaths (down from 35,095)
North America reported 827K new cases (down from 1.04 million) and 32,565 more deaths (slightly down from 32,720)
South America reported 507K new cases (down from 557K) and 13,034 more deaths (slightly down from 13,274)
Asia reported 466K new cases (down from 501K) and 6,310 more deaths (down from 7,373)
Africa reported 90.4K new cases (down from 111K) and 3,648 more deaths (down from 4,359)
Oceania reported 167 new cases and 2 deaths

Corners of the world

USA reported 699K new cases (down from 895K) and 21,816 more deaths (down from 23,246)
Brazil reported 317K new cases (down from 330K) and 7,474 more deaths (slightly up from 7,352)
India reported 77.3K new cases (down from 81.7K) and 632 deaths (780 last week)
Iran reported 51.4K new cases (up from 47.0K) and 473 deaths (529 last week)
Canada reported 22.6K new cases (down from 27.0K) and 553 deaths (808 last week)
South Africa reported 17.2K new cases (down from 26.6K) and 1,768 more deaths (down from 2,269)
Japan reported 12.7K new cases (down from 19.5K) and 639 deaths (683 last week)
South Korea reported 2,706 new cases (slightly down from 2,736) and 48 deaths (60 last week)
Asutralia reported 45 new cases (42 last week) no deaths

Europe in detail

Spain corrected all their data down up to 2 weeks into the past, not looking as bad anymore.
When it comes to reported deaths, the UK is still the worst off in Europe but recovering.

Israel is ahead with vaccinations, about half the population has received a second shot now. Cases are not going down much yet however
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/02/why-are-cases-rising-in-israel-the-most-vaccinated-country.html

“We’ve gotten to this weird point because the Israeli government didn’t listen to the experts who explained that even going at full speed, it couldn’t protect an entire population by vaccinating, which is always a linear process, while the virus itself kept growing exponentially in the population.”

Hospitalizations are down among the 60+ crowd (which have pretty much all received their second shot), however the British strain is running rampant along the younger population keeping the hospitals filled up.

And then there's the gaza strip, on the back burner...

Until last week, it did not distribute vaccines to the Palestinian Authority, the semi-autonomous government of the West Bank. This week, the Authority began a vaccination campaign with 7,000 doses of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines from Israel and 10,000 Sputnik V doses donated by Russia.

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

Yeah, that makes sense. If you believe in intelligent design, a lab virus becomes just another extension of this.

I also do wonder whether it will land it below or above influenza in terms of virulence. Some respiratory diseases such as RSV managed to land at fairly high infection fatality rates (0.25%) but are not very transmissible. But all the other coronaviruses have fallen well below influenza, so I hope that'll be that, at least in the mid to long term, once it runs out of hosts for viable dangerous mutations.