zlacker

>>ruarai+(OP)
My understanding of the author's central thesis is this: the US, despite its world-class virology and disease study labs, regularly has lapses in procedure that regularly lead to situations in which the public might be exposed. Given that this is happening in our own backyard, we might reasonably expect countries of similar status (like China) to experience similar lapses.

That reads as reasonable to me, but raises a subsequent question: if these lapses are so common and so many countries possess the capacity for serious mistakes, why don't we see more regular outbreaks (if not full-blown pandemics) caused by labs? In other words, what makes COVID special? I didn't find a satisfactory answer to the latter question in the article.

It's my (uninformed, uneducated) opinion that the severity of the author's claims don't correspond to the reality of the last few national and international disease crises (AIDS, Ebola, Zika, COVID). Which isn't to say that we should absolutely dismiss the possibility that COVID originated in a lab, only that claims that it did amount to currently unsubstantiated claims about COVID's special status among other recent pandemics.

>>woodru+bz1
COVID hits the sweet spot of infectiousness, asymptomatic spread, incubation time, and low mortality. I would expect the R of Ebola to be pretty low in developed countries. People wash their hands more often when every place you go to has running water, and if you show Ebola symptoms, you're going to the hospital, and if it's a hospital with a city that has a BSL4 lab, there isn't going to be an outbreak - someone will recognize what it is, and you'll be in an isolation unit in no time and your contacts will be quarantined.

I would expect such a case to make the headlines, but it's quite possible it would be quietly swept under the carpet. How well known was Reston back when it happened? If that didn't make the news, would a lab-originated outbreak?

With COVID, a worker could get infected, hide the exposure out of fear/shame, never show any symptoms... and yet start a pandemic.

With a low-probability high-impact event like a global pandemic, near misses are the only indicator you have until the one time it does go catastrophically wrong.