Guys, I know you might not know better, but this is fake news. The original SARS virus attacks through this mechanism.
The bat corona virus is the closest to the new COVID virus. They share somewhere upwards of 80% nucleotide identity. Which still leaves room for manipulation, don't get me wrong. But it's not so obvious as "Look! It can attack these receptors! This was engineered!"
Basically, the story goes that bats are a giant reservoir for viruses based on their diet. Normally viruses from arthropods (insects, bugs) can't go into mammals. Bats, however, eat their body weight in the things every day. Each virus, bacteria, and whatnot undergoes mutation with every replication. So while it may be one in a billion chances of a mutation being successful enough to transmit to mammals, a single bat eats so much that the probability becomes 1. But bats have adapted to this and it usually doesn't kill the host (or they're weeded out from the gene pool.) I may be paraphrasing heavily from a paper I read, but the virus can actually infect the normal flora in the bats stomach and also the normal flora in a human's stomach. It's entirely feasible that someone could have eaten a bat, the virus got in through that mechanism, and as viruses mutate constantly, could have mutated to a configuration more apt to infect humans and thus went from the stomach to the rest of the body.
It is somewhat without a doubt that the virus came from bats - early on there were leaks that employees of the institute were selling lab specimens to the food market across the street as "fresh meat" and people were bringing lab animals home as "pets."
That does not mean the Chinese didn't fuck with the genome of the virus and make alterations. But this isn't the evidence for that claim and makes us look dumb. Though the vast majority would not understand this, so only a small number of people would call you/Mike out on it. There's plenty of labs that do research on novel viruses found in bats around the world, so this part isn't strange. I wouldn't trust the Chinese government as far as I could throw them, so they were probably tinkering with it and it released because they're entirely incompetent.
Guys, I know you might not know better, but this is fake news. The original SARS virus attacks through this mechanism.
The bat corona virus is the closest to the new COVID virus. They share somewhere upwards of 80% nucleotide identity. Which still leaves room for manipulation, don't get me wrong. But it's not so obvious as "Look! It can attack these receptors! This was engineered!"
Basically, the story goes that bats are a giant reservoir for viruses based on their diet. Normally viruses from arthropods (insects, bugs) can't go into mammals. Bats, however, eat their body weight in the things every day. Each virus, bacteria, and whatnot undergoes mutation with every replication. So while it may be one in a billion chances of a mutation being successful enough to transmit to mammals, a single bat eats so much that the probability becomes 1. But bats have adapted to this and it usually doesn't kill the host (or they're weeded out from the gene pool.) I may be paraphrasing heavily from a paper I read, but the virus can actually infect the normal flora in the bats stomach and also the normal flora in a human's stomach. It's entirely feasible that someone could have eaten a bat, the virus got in through that mechanism, and as viruses mutate constantly, could have mutated to a configuration more apt to infect humans and thus went from the stomach to the rest of the body.
It is somewhat without a doubt that the virus came from bats - early on there were leaks that employees of the institute were selling lab specimens to the food market across the street as "fresh meat" and people were bringing lab animals home as "pets."
That does not mean the Chinese didn't fuck with the genome of the virus and make alterations. But this isn't the evidence for that claim and makes us look dumb. Though the vast majority would not understand this, so only a small number of people would call you/Mike out on it. There's plenty of labs that do research on novel viruses found in bats around the world, so this part isn't strange. I wouldn't trust the Chinese government as far as I could throw them, so they were probably tinkering with it and it released because they're entirely incompetent.
Edit: Oh and if you don't believe me, this paper was authored in 2004: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/path.1570
Thank you for the explanation. Knowledge is power.