Origin Story

The editors of the Washington Post remark on the search for the origins of SARS-CoV-2, closing their editorial with a quote I think they should have opened with:

“Preventing the next pandemic,” wrote Dr. Relman, “depends on understanding the origins of this one.”

I’ll summarize the story they tell:

1. It is probably zoonotic which is to say that dit originated in animals and at some point was contracted by humans.
2. No one knows what animal was the original host. Bats and pangolins (insectivorous mammals of Asia and Africa, whose bodies are covered in scales made of keratin, the same stuff your fingernails are) have been suggested.
3. The bat virus closest to SARS-CoV-2 isn’t particularly close.
4. The suggestion that it was genetically modified has been widely debunked.
5. “Community spread” of the virus may have started in the Wuhan “wet market”, a market where live animals are sold.
6. 30 of the first 100 reported cases of COVID-19 have no known connection to the Wuhan market.
7. Some have suggested it spread from a virology lab in Wuhan known to possess and study bat viruses.

If preventing the “next pandemic” depends on understanding the origins, we’re stuck. There is no real prospect for finding its origin definitively.

Intelligent people may differ about this but I think the conclusion we should draw from all of this is that the benefits of commerce with China have been wildly overstated while the risks, which, obviously are now well known, have been ignored. More than a million people have died of the virus, rather few in China. The costs of coping with the disease have exceed any imaginable benefits of trade with China by an order of magnitude.

Conditions there are distinctively conducive to the development of zoonotic diseases while the present government is far too predisposed to silencing anyone who might be giving people bad news. If we are to prevent the next pandemic we very much need to re-evaluate.