And that's the problem. Everyone is busy focusing on these things yet they don't seem to care about how we got here in the first place. If we don't know how we got here, we don't know how to keep from repeating it again in a few years.
Speaking of which, I saw a tweet thread about an interesting study this week, re-examining the early timeline of SARS-COV-2 in Wuhan.
Before all the Greek letter variants, before the Italian version which took over the world and what we commonly associate as the "wild" strain upon which the vaccines were originally based, at the very beginning there were two identified lineages called Wuhan A and Wuhan B. In dark and geeky virology, evolutionary biology, geneticist corners people have been trying to determine which came first, as identifying which came first would help drill down into the how and where this originated. But with so few genetic variations, and limited amount of samples from the early days, while there is an assumption A came before B, the necessary level of certainty does not exist for any formal declaration. This study offers a third possibility. Neither.
That Wuhan A and Wuhan B actually share a common ancestor within the animal reservoir. An infected herd, such as a shipment from a farm to a market, infected multiple humans around the same time, and one of those humans led to the A lineage, and one of those humans led to the B lineage. One of the implications being that when A leads to B or B leads to A, the original animal / human transmission Patient 0 had to be some minimum time in the past. But if A & B happen independently, the timeline for Patient 0, Patient 0's could be later than the current estimates.
The study authors note they originally thought the idea of multiple introductions was "bonkers" and they only started coming around to that idea after being unable to adequately answer questions about how A begat B or vice versa, and by re-examining how the virus came to the US. The first verified infected person arrived Jan 15, 2020 in the Seattle area. But future genetic examination revealed that this person was not responsible for setting off the chain of infections that brought the area to national prominence with the Lifecare of Kirkland situation. That outbreak, originated via an unknown person who arrived, probably around February 1st. Acknowledging the possibility of a multiple introduction scenario opened the mental door to consider that maybe the original cross-species event happened similarly.
The study makes no conclusions about origin, and mostly focuses on the lack of "transitional" elements between A & B, but the authors say they have developed a process to test their hypothesis that Lineage A and Lineage B were the result of multiple introductions and not a transition from one to the other. And they are still looking for verifiable, transitional genomes between A & B that would indicate a single introduction. So as they say, stay tuned...
But this type of science is methodical, slow and doesn't play out in the main stream media (nor should it). But the assumption that "no one cares how this got started" is inaccurate. Only a small percentage of people have the skills and knowledge to actually answer that question, and they have been doing their business the whole time. This study is only one example of the type of work that is occurring.