Comments by "Xyz Same" (@xyzsame4081) on "Timeline - World History Documentaries"
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@dennish3962 No there are many viri that cause the common cold and some of them come from the family of corono viri. The strains that usually infect humans are harmless. They cause the sniffles or the common cold (flu is more severe, dangerous and another virus category). Other corona viri only infect animals . Trouble starts usually when an animal infecting corona virus (there are many) jumps over to another species. could be other animals OR between animals and humans. Also the other way round. Humans could transfer a virus to chimpanzees that kill the apes but would be harmless for a human.
There is transfer with close contact (dealing with the animals) the feces are spread, etc. (for instance bat feces could drop on lifestock in an enclosure and the animals eat grass or there are trees with fruit, etc.) The direct contact infections often are severe.
Things can get REALLY bad when the new targets can pass it on among themselves. Must not be, but it is also not uncommon. Bats give the virus to camels, it is either harmless for them or they do not get sick at all (camels are valuable their owners would have noticed). So far not yet a problem. BUT: camels open opportunities for the virus that it did not have when it travevelled only by bat.
Humans usually do not interact a lot with bats, and are are less likely to mistakenly ingest their feces. (In China there are caves that are used by bats and if there is a downpour the local farmers working in the fields might go there for shelter. Or the farmers were so poor in the past that they developed a tradition of having bat soup, and they still eat that even though their nutrition has improved. ..... There you go.
In ? 2013 a version of a animal corona virus likely jumped from bats to dromedars and camels (or correctly in 2013 humans got into trouble and found out about the jump). Camels can pass it on to humans - mostly if they have contact with the camels or if someone handles fodder, etc.
It also can be transmitted between humans but is not very contagious between humans. Lucky us - the mortality rate with top class modern medicine is 30 %.
The timeline was:
The corona virus now also travels by camel. And then it turns out it can also infect humans who get it from camels (or there is another new mutation that allows that) and humans DO have severe symptoms. Camels seem to be immune to all the usual kind of human cold viri (including that out of the corona class) that infect humans: they have lived with humans long enough. Or the susceptible camels have not made it into the gene pool.
So camels do not catch bad infections from humans but now the opposite is possible.
One version of a switch (corona specialized in animals hops over to humans) caused problems in 2002 / 2003. SARS-Cov-1 was stopped as an epidemic (the virus does not exist in the population anymore, likely they have samples in labs, but not in the wild).
It caused severe problems in some Asian countries, one traveller arrived in Canada, but was quarantiened. It was stopped before it became a pandemic.
This time in Jan. 2020 a more contagious mutation of the already circulated SARS-CoV-2 emerged. It was even more contagious than the strain that caused problems in China. And the new strain promptly replaced the former one. By March it conquered the world. W/o that mutation it might never have become a pandemic (but remained an epidemic in Asia) and we would be blissfully ignorant that we dodged a bullet (another one, there were several in the last 25 years).
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