zlacker

>>delbar+(OP)
Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance researching the origins of pandemics, pointed out in April that nearly 3% of the population in China's rural farming regions near wild animals already had antibodies to coronaviruses similar to SARS. "We're finding 1 to 7 million people exposed to these viruses every year in Southeast Asia; that's the pathway. It's just so obvious to all of us working in the field..."

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/23/8417296...

>>Milner+nJ
Yeah, I initially thought having a big bio lab in the city where the pandemic started, in a country with a history of managing security in their bio labs poorly, in a lab known for studying sars like coronaviruses, including gain of function research to better bind to human ace2 receptors was just too many coincidences. You have to admit it's believable. But then when you realize how many people in rural China have been infected with sars like viruses, you start to understand that the whole country is like the ideal breeding ground for a bat virus to adapt to spreading in humans.

>>eloff+4K
The whole lab thing is people getting cause and effect mixed up, the lab is there because novel coronaviruses keep happening in that region, but because all people know is that COVID-19 is new (and none of the history) they immediately jump to that the lab specializing in this type of disease at the epicenter is too big of a coincidence to ignore (rather than it being there exactly because it is a common epicenter).

It is like putting an earthquake lab in the middle of a seismically active area, then blaming the lab when an earthquake occurs.

>>Someon+EK
In the article there isn't any discussion of cause and effect, it is a probabilistic model. Eg. being near a virus lab makes it more likely it's a lab escape, being 1000km away from the main zoonotic reservoirs (bat populations) in China make it less likely it's of zoonotic origin. This is not to say it's impossible as researchers do travel 1000km from Wuhan to get samples from bats. I'll not comment on the probabilities they assigned to each hypothesis (they may very well be discounting the likelihood of zoonotic origins too heavily) but that is the approach they took.

>>bingoj+jT
The point is, the probabilistic model treats it as “very surprising” that the virus originated in a city where there is a virus lab. But that becomes less surprising if you consider that virus labs will often be located in cities at high risk from zoonotic outbreaks.