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Message: [QUOTE="pj, post: 3480897, member: 2524"] JBM, I have no idea why you think I don't understand infectivity and the molecular biology of binding. I am a PhD scientist with decades of experience in molecular biology and therapeutics. The reason I pointed to gene sequence similarity is because it addresses the question of virus origins. I was not discussing virulence at all. As for the data in bats, there is no evidence at all of strain evolution in bats toward or anywhere near SARS-CoV-2. There is no evidence of a bat pool of coronavirus diversity that encompasses any of the key genetic components of SARS-CoV-2, much less the whole virus. Obviously, I was persuaded by the Tang et al report that there are two strains, a lethal strain that first appeared in November in Wuhan and is responsible for the high early death rate and the high death rate in places like Iran that received the lethal strain, and a weakened strain that first appeared in China in December or January. I think [U]that aspect of the paper[/U] is highly likely to be correct, as it is hard to imagine another explanation for the extreme variations we've seen in lethality by outbreak, some outbreaks at 5-20% lethality and some at 0.1-1% lethality. The critique of Tang et al you point to makes some reasonable objections to issues with the Tang paper (which I think cannot be totally honest due to constraints from the Chinese government), but they don't refute the idea that there are L and S strains. I think Tang et al know more than they have said and have highlighted for us two key mutations which, as time will show, greatly weaken virulence and turn the virus into a de facto "vaccine" against the lethal version. All of these questions will be resolved as we get more sequences from patients in the West and correlate them with outcomes, and observe whether and in what circumstances re-infections occur. As for your idea that most deaths were early and now there is some health care response that is mitigating death -- no, not in Italy. The healthcare response is not substantially better now in Europe than it was in Wuhan in January. If more people died in Wuhan, it is because the strain they contracted was more lethal. That lethal strain still has the potential to grow and spread. We are not yet safe from it. [/QUOTE]

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