How long is this coronavirus been around?
If you look at pandemics, most pandemics, especially for a totally novel virus
like this, most pandemics is you start looking... you'll find evidence that it was
actually around before we thought. Now a lot of people including a lot of
scientists and there at least docs early on thought this has been around
for months. I personally don't think so because again, you see how quickly it
spread throughout the world. It hasn't taken that many months to spread so I
don't think it's been around since early 2019 or before at all.
Now surely, coronavirus has the... coronavirus is a large fin. We've had coronavirus
for years, two of the more common versions of seasonal coughing, colds are
coronaviruses. In fact, more than two. But anyway, we're gonna get a little bit
deeper into that whole thing in a few minutes. That's going to be the major
program for today. So have you ever heard of the term biological or molecular
clock? It can look at things that happen on a fairly regular basis within biology.
And if you're able to count those things, you're able to start making some
estimates regarding how long something's been going on. Well viruses mutate as
they replicate, and these mutations can be used as a molecular clock to track a
virus through time and geography. That's what they're starting to do with
coronavirus. University College London Genetics Institute researcher Francois
Balloux and his team pulled viral sequences from a giant global database for
coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Those three words are actually have three different meanings
which we'll cover a little bit later. They looked at the samples taken at
different times and places. They indicated that the virus only started
infecting people, humans at the end of 2019, not very long before the virus was
identified. According to him, this rules out any scenario that assumes that
SARS-CoV-2 may have been circulation in humans long before it was identified and
have already infected large portions of the population. The team
wrote in a report that's published in Genetics and Evolution. Now, that can be
bad news. Why? Some doctors had hope the virus was circulating for many months
and quietly infected more people than reported. No. I think that conclusion is
pretty reliably wrong. I don't think we've got a lot of people that have been
infected for many months and just didn't know it. They hope that some immunity had
already been built in some populations. And again, no. I think this is a new
introduction. I think I've mentioned coronavirus is a family of viruses. A
couple of them have been around for ever for as long as we've been able to
delineate families. But this specific coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has also
probably been around for years but in populations like bat populations, not in
the human population. This information supports the conclusion that many of us
already had that. This is a new introduction. I came to the conclusion
personally because again, you don't see this kind of spread in something that's
been around for months and months a long time before this. SARS-CoV-2 is said to
have originated in bats but might have infected other animals before jumping to
humans. We have a major issue with similar type of virus, similar family in
camels. We know there's significant viral population in camels,
and we also know that camels are like horses for a large portion of mankind.
It's not practical to think that humans will minimise exposure to camels. The
first human cases of SARS can be... were reported in Wuhan, China last December.
Our results are in line with previous estimates and point to all sequences
sharing a common ancestor toward the end of 2019, supporting this is the period
when SARS-CoV-2 jumped in to its human hosts, according to the researchers.
Nevertheless, the virus' mutations do provide evidence of quick spread. The
virus is said to be already in affecting people in Europe, in the US, and
elsewhere weeks before the first reported cases in January/February. And
we're not going to find patient zero for those countries. However, there's no
evidence that the virus is mutating to become even more contagious or more
fatal. I would argue with that, and I would say, I don't think these guys were
at the time they wrote this report, I don't think they were aware of the Los
Alamos report that was coming out. It's right about the same time I think the
Los Alamos report that we reported on... was it yesterday... the days sort of fog
into my memory here... reported on that I think it was D614G or something
like that. I do believe that the evidence is pretty
strong for that mutation so I also think that the evidence is not as strong
regarding whether it's more virulent. I think it probably isn't, but I think the
evidence is also pretty strong. But it is more contagious? If you began to look at
that that Los Alamos mutation D614G, again, somebody fact-check the
letters in the number, the earlier Europe-based coronavirus session was
what started in the first few days in the New York area, and it appeared within
a few days that it was replaced by the more by the other. The Los Alamos
mutation is not going to replace that quickly unless it's significantly more
contagious.
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