Someone please explain to me how the Chinese were able to identify that that had a new virus.
I’ve done pandemic drills with homeland security. They said they way you know you’ve got a new virus floating around is either new symptoms; significantly more “flu like” cases; significantly more cases escalating to pneumonia; increased deaths.
Covid presents like the flu, so much so you need a test, but early on a test was not available. So the symptoms are not unique.
Early on there was not a spike in cases, so that would not have sparked an interest.
Early on there was not a significant uptick in flu cases turning to to pneumonia, so that would not have sparked interest.
Early on there was not a spike in deaths, so that would not have e sparked an interest.
In fact when the Chinese discovered covid, there was absolutely no evidence that anything out of the ordinary was taking place.
But somehow the Chinese knew that they had a very contagious, bat based virus circulating, based on no information.
Everyone is focused on the wrong thing, I want to know how they discovered it with no information?
I’ve always believed this was an lab accident by a technician that needed their job so they covered it up until they and too many family members got sick and it was obvious something was wrong.
They knew about the virus because it was being studied, and that’s the only answer that makes any sense.
tl;dr: mNGS [1]
Longer answer as I think you may need to be mansplained because you wrote a long post which could be answered by a simple Google search and Wikipedia article:
Step 1: Doctor wonder why their patients were so sick, looks like infection but no pathogens identified, this is actually not that rare as there are many obscure pathogens even for experienced doctors.
Step 2: Patients agrees to pay for mNGS. Nurse draw their blood, send to lab.
Step 3: mNGS matches every DNA "pieces" from the patients' blood against a database. One of those pieces matched the original SARS with about 90% similarity.
Step 4: Chaos in the lab, the hospital and the government.
Step 5: "We've detected a new virus"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_metagenomic_sequencin...