“If that first person who brought that into the Huanan market had decided to not go that day, or even was too ill to go and just stayed at home, that or other early super-spreading events might not have occurred,” says Michael Worobey, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. “We may never have even known about it!”
Worobey worked a new study published in the journal Science, which CNN describes as concluding that “The coronavirus pandemic almost didn’t happen.”
Only bad luck and the packed conditions of the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan — the place the pandemic appears to have begun — gave the virus the edge it needed to explode around the globe, the researchers reported in the journal Science. “It was a perfect storm — we know now that it had to catch a lucky break or two to actually firmly become established,” Worobey told CNN…
The team employed molecular dating, using the rate of ongoing mutations to calculate how long the virus has been around. They also ran computer models to show when and how it could have spread, and how it did spread… The study indicates only about a dozen people were infected between October and December, Worobey said… What’s needed is an infected person and a lot of contact with other people — such as in a densely packed seafood market. “If the virus isn’t lucky enough to find those circumstances, even a well-adapted virus can blip out of existence,” Worobey said.
“It gives you some perspective — these events are probably happening much more frequently than we realize. They just don’t quite make it and we never hear about them,” Worobey said…
In the models the team ran, the virus only takes off about 30% of the time. The rest of the time, the models show it should have gone extinct after infecting a handful of people.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot