Although the world is moving towards addressing and overcoming the emerging corona virus "Covid-19", there are aspects that may help to better understand the pandemic, which may help us address it, and here we ask 4 questions.
Did the Corona virus leak from the Wuhan laboratory?
The French magazine Le Point (Le point) spoke about the story of 30 netizens who met - as Jeremy Andre, the magazine's correspondent in Asia says in his report - and carefully examined the disturbing inconsistencies in the official Chinese version of the Corona virus, and called themselves "DRASTIC", It is the acronym for the Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19, and in less than a year, this team has released its exciting findings.
The report said that the Institute of Virology in Wuhan - which is the largest center for studies of corona viruses in China and one of the most important in the world, led by virologist Shi Zhangyi known for discovering viruses associated with bats - published in January 2020 an article presenting a new virus "RaTG13" (RaTG13). He said that it is present in nature and shares with the emerging corona virus - its scientific name “SARS-CoV-2” (SARS-CoV-2) - 96.2% of its genetic makeup, so the institute considered it the closest known virus to the virus that causes Covid-19, noting that This virus was found in a mine in Yunnan Province, 1,500 km southwest of Wuhan, in 2013.
And Germany-based biologist Rosanna Segreto found that RAG13 had its genetic sequence completed roughly in 2018 under another name.
A member of the "Drastech" team interacted with scientific publications in Mandarin Chinese on databases known only to Chinese researchers, and was able to read a master's thesis in medicine for the year 2013 and a doctoral thesis for the year 2018.
These documents discuss the causes of a disease whose symptoms are identical to those of Covid-19, and it was infected by 6 employees of Mujiang Municipality in Yunnan, southwest China, who were cleaning a mine in Yunnan from bat droppings, and 3 of them died, and the study team found that this is exactly the place of the discovery of “Rateg.” 13".
Your study's research showed that there were dozens of viruses that were taken from the same mine between 2012 and 2015, and elsewhere in the region, and were not published either.
Finally, another web investigator and open source intelligence analyst named Charles Small revealed that;
Shi Changji's team hid virus databases on September 12, 2019, 3 months before the coronavirus outbreak was revealed.
How many invisible carriers of corona infection?
With the start of the Corona pandemic, there are conflicting estimates on the number of asymptomatic patients who play a huge role in the spread of the epidemic.
American researchers published a study in the journal "PNAS" and reported by "Deutsche Welle", in which they presented new numbers they reached through two separate analyzes.
According to their estimates, it is possible that about a third of Corona infections will be completely asymptomatic.
In the first analysis, the research team evaluated more than 350 studies that tracked coronavirus infection in the laboratory over a long period of time.
The scientific team found that 35.1% of the people who tested positive did not show any symptoms.
As for the second analysis, it included studies conducted on people who were without symptoms at the time of the test, and then they were re-examined, and 36.9% of them maintained their status without symptoms.
What is the role of bats?
We turn to a recent study that found that bats living in limestone caves in northern Laos carry corona viruses that share with the emerging corona virus in a major feature, and was quoted by the German news agency.
And Bloomberg news agency reported that researchers at the French Pasteur Institute and the University of Laos searched for viruses similar to those that cause Covid-19 among hundreds of horseshoe bats.
And they found that 3 of them have very similar receptor-binding domains, which is the part of the spike protein of the Corona virus that is used to bind to the human “ACE2” enzyme that the virus targets to cause infection.
The results, which were presented in a research paper the day before yesterday, Friday and are being considered for publication by the journal Nature, show that viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 are present in nature, including in many types of horseshoe bats. .
The research supports the hypothesis that the pandemic started from an outbreak of a virus carried by bats.
Mark Elliott, head of the pathogen discovery department at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, along with other study participants, said that the three viruses that were discovered in Laos, called “BANAL-52” and “BANAL-103” (BANAL-103). BANAL-236 is the "closest ancestor of SARS-CoV-2" known to date.
He added, "These viruses may have contributed to the origin of "SARS-Cove-2", and may pose a fundamental danger in the future with direct transmission to humans."
How can intelligence agencies help stop future epidemics?
Scott Gottlieb, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has written in the Washington Post about the role intelligence agencies can play in stopping future epidemics.
He said that collecting information on a particular disease outbreak may be hidden by the country concerned, we cannot rely solely on public health agencies and their tools for international cooperation.
"Our government has the ability to collect epidemiological facts even when other countries don't want to share them," he says.
He said intelligence agencies' work to monitor outbreaks would advance our public health goals and help protect against enemies who might try to exploit the chaos caused by the health crisis.
"Leveraging intelligence assets to alert us to new outbreaks and the conditions they create will also complement our diplomatic tools. The intelligence community has access to alternative data sources such as satellites that can be mined and shared with diplomats to alert us to an emerging disease," he added.
"If intelligence assessments identify particular weaknesses in a foreign country's scientific institutions, our diplomats will be in a better position to know where to prioritize their efforts; for example, a laboratory with weak internal controls or certain areas where disease surveillance is particularly weak," he said.
He concluded by saying that a new doctrine will allow us to look at public health preparedness through the lens of national security to respond more quickly when new threats emerge.