zlacker

>>codech+(OP)
While this article is quite illuminating on the political side of the lab leak theory, on the evidence side it's mostly a rehash of some long-standing speculations.

The only recent evidence it contains is the fact that 3 researchers from WIV sought hospital care back in autumn of 2019 with symptoms similar to COVID. However, this piece of evidence is hardly consequential without further details:

- First, most common symptoms of COVID are indistinguishable from common cold. If the researchers were known to have any "signature" symptoms like loss of smell the article would certainly mention it.

- Second and more importantly, China doesn't have a robust GP/family doctor system found in western countries. As a result, many people would go to hospitals directly whenever they're mildly sick.

Taking the evidence as we know it now, the straightforward explanation is that 3 researchers caught cold, got mildly sick, so went to the hospital to get prescriptions or doctor's notes for sick leave (in China it's common for employers to require a doctor's note even for a short sick leave).

That said, I believe the lab leak theory is still plausible, and shouldn't be ruled out unless a clear transmission path from bat to human has been identified (which was done for the 2002 SARS outbreak). But I also think that we may never know. I trust that some theories put forward were in good faith, but so far they are little more than speculations.

>>tmp404+xf
I'm quite astounded and confused at the sudden shift in discourse towards assuming that the lab leak theory must be true. It's not so much the theory itself that's surprising. Lab leak remains plausible but less probable then natural origins.

The sudden shift is just baffling to me though. This huge new furor is due to anonymous CIA sources saying three people got sick? That's extremely tenuous evidence, as you state above.

As far as I can tell, the only biological evidence is the furin cleavage site, which is not uncommon in related viruses. Also, this has been known since the beginning, when the Chinese CDC released the first genome of the virus.

This seems more like people declaring victory because they're finally getting a hint of public support for their suspicions, rather than some truly damning evidence.

>>bglaze+Yq
What makes you think it's less probable than natural origins? The wet market has probably been there for 1,000 years and this hasn't happened. Compared to the virus appearing in one of 3 labs in the world that would be studying it.

>>TheBig+ru
The Wuhan wet market episode, in retrospect, was almost certainly a superspreading event rather than a patient zero situation. The virus's effects are so variable from person to person (lots of asymptomatic carriers, people who just get a little cold, symptoms undistinguishable from the flu) that it was almost certainly already circulating in Wuhan unnoticed, until it became big enough to be hard not to notice.

Consider for example what happened in the US, in Washington state at the beginning of the pandemic. The first local community transmissions were detected weeks after they had already started happening, even though there was already a relatively high degree of alertness. Without testing, it wouldn't have been detected at all until a similar superspreading event finally took place.

The very fact that miners got sick a few years ago makes it also sound likely, based on Wuhan's history and based on the virus's characteristics, that bat-to-human transmission took place in similar circumstances as the miners' a few weeks or months before the Wuhan wet market event, had some low-key human-to-human transmission simmering in the community which people wrote off as the flu (at worse), until that one superspreading event.