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Comment by n0rbwah | Hacker News Reader

As was the case with SARS, it's believed that the virus made the jump from bats to humans through another animal intermediary.

It was determined to be civets for SARS and I heard it was believed it might be pangolins for the new virus (but don't quote me on this).

AFAIK, it shouldn't be possible for the bats viruses we know to make the jump directly to humans.

So eating bats wasn't the cause of the outbreak in SARS and isn't the cause either for the new virus.

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Pretty sure there was a story from a few years ago of a person dying from a then unknown virus after contact with a fruit bat in Queensland.

Edit. Here’s a link but not sure if this was the one https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-02-22/queensland-boy-dies-o...

Oh, that's entirely possible.

I just heard that for this particular virus (the bat virus believed to be the ancestor of 2019-nCov), transmission to human without an intermediary was very unlikely since the bat version used a receptor that doesn't have an equivalent in human to infect cells.

Any animal, wild or domestic, can theoretically transmit diseases to humans if the conditions are right.

Ironically researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology demonstrated in 2013 "intermediate hosts may not be necessary for direct human infection by some bat like corona viruses"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5389864/

Also, the lancet publication found that the first diagnoses on December 1st had no link to the seafood market

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Furthermore, university of Toronto just published a model showing likely start of the outbreak was November, which aligns with first reported diagnoses in December.

https://www.utoronto.ca/news/model-built-u-t-researchers-sug...

On that basis we should at the very least be cautious of the bat soup intermediary theory, and the media should stop reporting it as a fact that it was the source of the outbreak.

There are more than one Corona virus in the wild already. Usually they cause a simple cold. Also, did you know there are recurring outbreaks, albeit very limited ones, of Hanta in the western world? And the plague in India? And Ebola in Africa, right now?

Seriously, the press is notoriously bad at reporting stuff like that, like all complex potetialy scary things. I just thought that a community like HN would be wiser than falling for Dunning-Kruger about the own competency when it comes to diseases, and to go down the twitter / Youtube / "dark corners of the internet" hole.

The current claim in the media is that intermediate hosts are the vector for the virus. It is clear from published research an intermediate vector is not required.

These are all peer reviewed journals. There are no links to twitter / youtube / dark corners of the internet here. You assume that commenters on HN don't have experience working in this field.

I feel like this comment has been made without an insight into a biosafety lab's day to day workings or reading those papers from an informed perspective - so assuming a Dunning-Kruger effect through a lack of understanding of the person submitting the comments on HN. I believe this would be classed as a relativist-fallacy.

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