lol
You want pics? I give you pics.
First, let me state unequivocally that Matlab is a gigantic PITA. I vastly prefer R or even Python with numpy and matplotlib. However my colleagues are leftards so they demand the inferior toolset. Naturally.
Okay - first - the original SARS virus came out of Vietnam, not China. It was discovered by Dr Carlo Urbani in the French Hospital in Hanoi. Dr Urbani died from contracting the disease from one of his patients. Here is a pretty thorough summary of the history.
The similarity with Covid is that the virus causes cell fusion. The dissimilarity is that unlike Covid, the original SARS virus cross-binds with other cell surface receptors besides ACE-2, like the glycoprotein C-type lectin CD209L.
Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) is a receptor for SARS-CoV, the novel coronavirus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome [Li, W. Moore, M. J., Vasilieva, N., Sui, J., Wong, S. K., Berne, M. A., Somasundaran, M., Sullivan, J. L., Luzuriaga, K., Greenough, T. C., et al. (2003) Nature...
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
It's interesting to read the early literature on SARS from the early 2000's because they didn't have nearly the diagnostic power we have today. They did a great job very quickly, given the tools at their disposal. For instance -
Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is a new infectious disease caused by a novel coronavirus that leads to deleterious pulmonary pathological features. Due to its high morbidity and mortality and widespread occurrence, SARS has evolved as an ...
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Now, with respect to Covid, which is called SARS-2 because it results in the same set of
symptoms (although with significant differences in terms of the age groups affected and the clearance times), the wet market theory places the first infection about 4 days prior to the first reported wet market case, which would make it around Dec 5 2019.
The problem with that theory is, there are multiple cases reported as far back as early October. There are definitively multiple cases in mid-November. There is a definitive case of a 55 year old individual on Nov 17, a hundred miles away from the wet market -
FRIDAY, June 25, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- The first case of COVID-19 may have occurred in China weeks earlier than previously thought, a new study
www.orthoatlanta.com
- and at least one definitive case in late October.
Using molecular dating tools and epidemiological simulations, researchers at UC San Diego School of Medicine estimate that the SARS-CoV-2 virus likely circulated undetected for two months before the first human cases of COVID-19 were described in Wuhan, China in late-December 2019.
health.ucsd.edu
These cases prove that the Covid virus was circulating well before the wet market outbreak.
"...the market cluster is unlikely to have marked the beginning of the pandemic because the earliest documented COVID-19 cases had no connection to the market". (ibid)
Scientists in Australia used the "most recent common ancestor" method to regress the transmission of the virus.
"Based on this work, the researchers estimate that the median number of persons infected with SARS-CoV-2 in China was less than one until November 4, 2019. Thirteen days later, it was four individuals, and just nine on December 1, 2019."
"The index case can conceivably predate the common ancestor — the actual first case of this outbreak may have occurred days, weeks or even many months before the estimated common ancestor. Determining the length of that ‘phylogenetic fuse’ was at the heart of our investigation".
Here is a lengthy but thorough article describing Dr. Worobey's first tracing efforts while he was at the University of Arizona:
More generally - it is likely that sarbecovirus closely related to SARS-2 has been around southern China and southeast Asia (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laid) for thousands of years. The virus will go extinct whenever it lacks a host, then reappear through ongoing genetic recombination. We can actually estimate the frequency of such events.
Nevertheless, for this particular outbreak, the statistics say the most likely "patient one" was infected at or around October 4 2019, with a 95% likelihood.
Author summary While the COVID-19 pandemic continues, questions still persist as to its origins. Evidence is building that its origin as a zoonotic spillover occurred before the officially accepted timing of early December, 2019. We date the origin of COVID-19 cases from 203 countries and...
journals.plos.org
The wet market theory has therefore been completely debunked. On the basis of the well documented Nov 17 case alone, the wet market theory is impossible.
In fact, on the same day as the putative wet market outbreak in early December, the Covid virus was already circulating in France and Italy.
The Chinese government has gone to great lengths to control the flow of information associated with the Covid virus, even reaching into the WHO and the US medical community.
"
Another study published by scientists from University College London had contended that the virus likely first emerged in October 2019 and had begun rapidly spreading around the world by December that year. Earlier this week, researcher Jesse Bloom
published a preprint noting that he had recovered genomic sequencing data of the virus from early cases, which had been removed from the U.S. government’s database. The National Institutes of Health (NIH)
confirmed that the samples had been deleted at the request of Chinese investigators, who said they would be updated and submitted to another archive. This sparked further speculation that China was trying to cover up the origins of the pandemic".
The start date of the coronavirus outbreak has been a subject of intrigue for scientists and many have suggested it may have been spreading long before the first case was detected in December 2019.
www.forbes.com
This is one of the reasons Anthony Fauci should be in jail. Since when do scientific samples related to a US epidemic get destroyed "at the request of the Chinese government"?
China never did update the results. There was no new Chinese archive. The data had to be scraped from raw Chinese hospital sources by Harvard Medical School. The citations are in the links.