zlacker

>>datafl+(OP)
Something which hasn't been able to be answered for me on this yet:

Where are all the bats infected with this virus? It it came from a bat, it would have had to be circulating in the bat population a LOT to mutate enough to jump to humans, right?

So...why not go find a bad, identify the parent virus, and close this whole thing out?

>>thepas+Ig
The bats , horseshoe bats, located in caves approximately a thousand kilometers away have often carried these viruses. [0] And at least 6 times since the year 2000 the collection of these bats have led to humans getting sick. It just takes some fecal matter dust.

So a very likely explanation is some low level employees grabbed some bats, got their suits and vehicles contaminated didn't clean things properly, drove down to the Wuhan laboratory, and rested in town spreading virus contaminated dust or if they were already sick, their virus filled respiration about.

No lab leak needed, just the regular practices when "Wuhan Institute of Virology in China sampled thousands of horseshoe bats in locations across the country", and those doing so were being sloppy, as they have been known to be repeatably.

[0] Bat cave solves mystery of deadly SARS virus — and suggests new outbreak could occur - December 2017 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9

>>moltic+Ym
It's a possible explanation, but that doesn't mean it's "very likely". In that case it would be easy enough to drive back down to the cave and collect the missing evidence of bat origin. Better yet, you'd never have to disclose the low-level employee part, so there'd be no political fallout. Easy win.

Also, my understanding (quite possibly wrong) is that while humans can get sick from bats, as cave workers did in Southern China, those viruses aren't contagious in the sense that the sick humans go on to infect others. "Since no case of an epidemic caused by direct bat-to-human transmission has yet been demonstrated, it is thought that the transfer to humans more probably took place via an intermediate host species in which the virus could evolve and move towards forms likely to infect human cells." [1] If that's right then your explanation of spilled bat samples is incomplete: it doesn't explain what caused the bat samples to adapt into a form that could spread among humans. That sort of puts us back at square 1. Another way of saying this is that if your explanation is likely, then we'd have expected the pandemic to have started where the bats are - through sick cave workers or something similar. But in fact it started far away.

[1] https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/the-origin-of-sars-cov-2-is-be...