[baja_blast]

And what is this consensus based upon outside of what is most beneficial for their field of study? As stated in the article we have not found any infected animals, no antibodies or samples pointing to infected animals, no precursor viruses found circulating in any animals species, no separate spillover events nothing. This is something we find for all spillovers and all of this evidence was uncovered almost immediately for SARS1/MERS. Take a look at the current bird flu situation cropping up, whenever we find a case, we find infected animals at the farm, we find the virus in animals during random sampling, we find the virus in raw milk, we observe many independent outbreaks etc.

How is it that such an infectious virus no longer exists in any animal population? It's as if after the first human got infected the virus simply vanished off the face of the Earth like some sort of immaculate infection. Now how come when humans infected cats/dogs/deer etc. via reverse zoonosis that SARS2 didn't stop circulating in humans?

[yawpitch]

Likely precursors have been known in both bats and pangolins since virtually the start of the pandemic (see below) and are widely found in those populations to this day; the entire catalogue of possible precursor genomes in both wild bats and pangolins is (and likely will remain) extremely undersampled (to the degree we barely see any of the current picture of the wild viral load of these animals), so your apparent expectation of them being found in anything like the population of almost entirely domesticated populations of Arabian dromedaries (MERS) and entirely domesticated commercial cattle (current H5N1 spillover risk) is quite simply ludicrous. As it’s entirely possible the spillover mutation was either within a single, long-eaten, animal sample or occurred in a single human post-infection there’s no reason to assume the original lineage of SARS-CoV-2 itself would ever be captured in any wild animal population.

I don’t even know how to speak to the bizarre (but possibly simply badly communicated on your part) assertion that human -> animal re-transmission events either should (or even could) result in a magic cessation of circulation in humans, as that’s just nonsensical. Post human SARS-CoV-2 lineage infections still persist in animal populations (mink, for example) and likely will continue to do so essentially forever… there’s literally nothing immaculate about this entire situation.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9