mkey says:
Here’s the thing about the “novelty” of the virus that I don’t get. Assuming that viruses even exist, you have to start somewhere.
The germ theory says:
– there are millions of millions (of millions?) of viruses
– there are thousands (millions?) of mutations
– due to above, viruses comprise an ever changing landscape
How can we then, in these conditions, state that some virus is new with any degree of certainty?
Let’s for sake of clarity say there are 1 trillion (12 zeros) of viruses out there, all strands included at some given moment in time.
If we assume there is a massive database comprising “all” viruses and their genetic makeup, we are assuming that we had scientists do the whole Koch’s or at least River’s postulates procedure one trillion times. MINIMUM, that’s assuming no virus has ever been properly analyzed two times.
Time. How much (wo)man hours would it take to process 1 trillion samples? I’ve found references that the test takes some 4 hours, so sequencing has got to take even longer than that. Lets be very conservative and say one sample can be processed in 4 hours and after the processing we get an unique “id” that can be put into the database.
4 hours x 1 trillion => 57,077,625 years for one scientist working 8 hours per day, every day. Assuming we had a million people working every day 8 hours on this project, that would take just a bit more than 57 years. Again, we are talking about sequencing every virus only once and the whole process taking 4 hours.
With all of this said and done, the best we could say is “we haven’t isolated this virus before, it’s not in our database, we haven’t seen it YET. It could be that it was out there for a million years, we simply don’t know. We have a massive catalogue but our resources are finite”.
Even if we had a trillion virus genotypes on file, how certain can we be that the record is complete if we don’t know how many are out there? Remember, the germ theory says new viruses are showing up all the time, all over the the place.
For the patient 0 story to hold even a drop of water, this virus needs to be NEW, as in “mint condition, in original packaging where available” type of new. If there is no patient 0, what’s the point of contact tracing? If the virus is not new, why are people scared of something that is possibly not new?
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