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>>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-19 is one of the few serious diseases that can transmit when the carrier is asymptomatic. That could be a credible reason why a potential lab leak went unnoticed for long enough to begin uncontrolled community spread.

>>cowmoo+4C1
CNN sold us on asymptomatic spread but it’s actually highly unlikely: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w

>>mrfusi+ET1
I've seen this study shared around anti-vaxer groups trying to claim that asymptomatic spread is unlikely. But this study does not prove that at all. They screened 10 million people with no symptoms, and found 300 asymptomatic cases. Then they re-screened 1200 contacts of those cases and didn't find any more cases that they missed. This doesn't prove that asymptomatic spread is unlikely. It proves that the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 when they did the screening was very low, and that 100% of the cases they found were asymptomatic. I'd be careful to draw conclusions from just one Chinese study, but if anything, this study suggests the opposite of what you're claiming.

>>yosito+Rd3
I can’t quite follow the line of reasoning here. Can you simplify or rephrase?

(Also nice touch to question the credibility by associating it with anti vaxxers)

That’s by no means the only study though. Here’s a meta-analysis of 54 studies (link to paper is in article)

https://alachuachronicle.com/university-of-florida-researche...

>>mrfusi+r05
> I can’t quite follow the line of reasoning here. Can you simplify or rephrase?

I was pretty clear, and so was the original study you linked from nature.com. If you can't follow the reasoning of something that simple, should anyone take your claims to be coming from someone who knows what they're talking about?

From the second meta-study you linked:

> We found significantly higher secondary attack rates from symptomatic index cases than asymptomatic or presymptomatic index cases, although less data were available on the latter. The lack of substantial transmission from observed asymptomatic index cases is notable. However, presymptomatic transmission does occur, with some studies reporting the timing of peak infectiousness at approximately the period of symptom onset.

They state very clearly that though their analysis showed a lower secondary attack rate from asymptomatic index cases (0.7-4.9%), they have limited data from which to draw that conclusion, and that presymptomatic transmission does occur. Which means, you can catch SARS-CoV-2 from someone who doesn't know that they're sick.

That's according to the study you linked, and it's far from the claim you made that asymptomatic spread is "actually highly unlikely".