zlacker

>>ruarai+(OP)
This is a great article explaining why a lab leak should always be a suspect. The alternative theory is that a virus traveled on its own (via bats or other animals) from bat caves 900km away to Wuhan where there are 2 labs researching bats. One of the labs is lesser known but is right next to the seafood market and the hospital where the outbreak was first known. [1]

This article points out that a lab outbreak could have happened in the United States and many places in the world. We need to avoid demonizing China over this if we want to ever find out the truth and learn how to prevent another pandemic outbreak.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200214144447/https://www.resea...

>>gregwe+pV1
There is no requirement that bats be transported to Wuhan. It's close to a known bat virus, and that's all we know. There are local bats in Wuhan, needless to say. Other species can easily be involved. The truth is that there is nothing particularly surprising about the way this virus evolved. Fundamentally this is a pandemic like any other. They happen in some species or another every year.

And that, more than anything else, is why we should be suspicious of "exotic" theories like human intervention. It's an extraordinary claim, and it requires extraordinary proof. You seem to be arguing the opposite, when Occam is clear that we should be betting on natural evolution.

>>ajross+1n2
The fact that they didn't find an intermediate host after more than a year of search should tell you something.

>>bgandr+Lp2
It took nearly a century to somewhat establish the geographical origin of the Spanish flu and even these results are still a bit controversial to this day [0].

The reality is that epidemiology is not a straight forward nor simple field of research, finding concrete and solid answers is usually way more difficult than most people assume when they want answers to point fingers.

[0] https://academic.oup.com/emph/article/2019/1/18/5298310

>>freefl+qK2
what I'm saying is that until the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2 is known to be exactly the same virus that was researched in Wuhan institute of virology, it's obvious that lab leak should be number 1 hypothesis. That wouldn't be so, if covid started in Beijing or Nanjing. Or if Wuhan wouldn't be home to one of the two BSL–4 labs in China. And the only lab to my mind that investigated SARS-CoV-2 closest known relative before the outbreak. But since all those facts are true, I really have a hard time considering other hypotheses.

>>bgandr+S63
SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in Wuhan, but it's not that clear that it's where it originated. The genetic divergence between RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 is explained with about 20 years of natural evolution, which puts the common ancestor somewhere in late 2000s, and given that bats migrate, the ancestor occurred potentially anywhere in Eurasia or even Africa.

Post-hoc analysis of waste water and patient samples in Europe shows that it was circulating in Europe by mid-late 2019, way before the patient 0 in Wuhan.

So the leak hypothesis, while feasible, would have to address why the virus was seemingly abroad before it became a problem in Wuhan itself.

Of course it's a reasonable hypothesis, but putting it as number 1 is kind of reframing the whole picture.

>>Uberph+Az3
"Post-hoc analysis of waste water and patient samples in Europe shows that it was circulating in Europe by mid-late 2019, way before the patient 0 in Wuhan."

now this is what's called a conspiracy theory.

>>bgandr+GI4
> ROME (Reuters) - The new coronavirus was circulating in Italy in September 2019, a study by the National Cancer Institute (INT) of the Italian city of Milan shows, signaling that it might have spread beyond China earlier than thought.

https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...

It is plausible that the virus was spread before recognized and treated as a global pandemic. Few flights were banned for months. Chinese tourists were in Italy up until the lockdowns.

But very often this "appeared outside China" is deflection and falsely invoked. Mind you that Reuters write: "it might have spread beyond China earlier than thought". Not: It came from Italy to China, and only became problematic in Wuhan. Every time China is reluctantly forced to move back the timeline on its patient 0, it starts pushing a narrative of COVID outside of China just a few months before their patient 0. It is a tiring use of an obvious and plausible bait-and-switch.

We already knew that Western expats and their relations in Wuhan got viral pneumonia in November 2019, while by January 2020, China did not consider it wise to inform the world of human-to-human transmission.

>>2-tpg+cG5
> But very often this "appeared outside China" is deflection and falsely invoked. Mind you that Reuters write: "it might have spread beyond China earlier than thought". [...] We already knew that Western expats and their relations in Wuhan got viral pneumonia in November 2019

Let's backtrack a bit.

First patient in France confirmed to be in late December 2019[0].

Retrospective wastewater analysis in Brazil shows the virus was present from November 2019 onwards, 3 months before their first reported case.[1]

Further down the line we have SARS-CoV-2's RdRP specific antibodies found during retrospective testing of samples of 111 (of 959) healthy volunteers of a lung cancer study in Italy[1]; samples taken in October 2019, meaning they got infected at least at some point in September 2019, 4-5 months before the first detected case. These antibodies also target RaTG13's RdRP, given that this protein is identical in both.

Even further down the line, and widely interpretable, we have the Barcelona case:

> "Coronavirus traces found in March 2019 sewage sample, Spanish study shows. The discovery of virus genome presence so early in Spain, if confirmed, would imply the disease may have appeared much earlier than the scientific community thought." [2]

The paper is here [3]. The fact that IP2/IP4 fragments of the RdRP gene are perfect match means that at least a virus very similar to SARS-CoV-2 (and RaTG13, its closest relative) was present in Spain back in March 2019.

It's not conclusive, as other markers tested negative, but it's also true that these other markers tend to degrade faster (for example, N1 marker wasn't detectable in May 25 2020, despite the pandemic ongoing). But this fact also rules out a case of sample contamination, because then N1 would have been detectable. It's also remarkable that the positive sample is from 2 weeks after the World Mobile Congress, leading to a self-contained outbreak hypothesis.

Now take all that information and combine it with the fact that no trace of SARS-CoV-2 has been found on any sample from Wuhan before December 1st, 2019.

While there's high probability that SARS-CoV-2 appeared within Chinese borders, mainly because the closest viral relatives have been known to live there (or Japan and South East Asia, if you ignore RaTG13), it's still highly speculative.

What is clear is that everything points in the direction of Wuhan, and the Huanan Seafood Market in particular, being just the first detected superspreading event, and the WIV was the reason why it was detected first, rather than the source of the virus itself.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-france...

[1] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200701/SARS-CoV-2-circul...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-...

[4] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v...