zlacker

Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance researching the origins of pandemics, pointed out in April that nearly 3% of the population in China's rural farming regions near wild animals already had antibodies to coronaviruses similar to SARS. "We're finding 1 to 7 million people exposed to these viruses every year in Southeast Asia; that's the pathway. It's just so obvious to all of us working in the field..."

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/23/8417296...

>>Milner+(OP)
Yeah, I initially thought having a big bio lab in the city where the pandemic started, in a country with a history of managing security in their bio labs poorly, in a lab known for studying sars like coronaviruses, including gain of function research to better bind to human ace2 receptors was just too many coincidences. You have to admit it's believable. But then when you realize how many people in rural China have been infected with sars like viruses, you start to understand that the whole country is like the ideal breeding ground for a bat virus to adapt to spreading in humans.

>>eloff+H
The whole lab thing is people getting cause and effect mixed up, the lab is there because novel coronaviruses keep happening in that region, but because all people know is that COVID-19 is new (and none of the history) they immediately jump to that the lab specializing in this type of disease at the epicenter is too big of a coincidence to ignore (rather than it being there exactly because it is a common epicenter).

It is like putting an earthquake lab in the middle of a seismically active area, then blaming the lab when an earthquake occurs.

>>Someon+h1
The lab theory is better suited for a movie, as no hard evidence has been presented.

Oddly enough, it seems the virus will end up transmitting the Chinese control over its people to several western countries.

At least where I live a quite scary addendum to the current epidemic law has been presented. If passed, it will grant the possibility to test people at an event and fine those that won't comply.

>>Milner+(OP)
It would make a lot of sense that SARS-COV2 was spreading in Southern China for a while, but going unnoticed, due to immunity. Then, as soon as one of those rural workers visits another major city further up north, it gets a chance to spread in a more susceptible population.

>>eloff+H
This is addressed in the article, although I don't see sources, so who knows how accurate it is.

>The most similar coronavirus is found among bats that don’t live nearby, and scientists have not been able to pinpoint the exact point where SARS-CoV-2 transferred to humans

>>Someon+h1
> The whole lab thing is people getting cause and effect mixed up, the lab is there because novel coronaviruses keep happening in that region...

That is not the case, the outbreak in Wuhan came as a surprise even to the virologists there.

The region where you would expect this to happen is Southern China, where there's bats living close to humans, not Wuhan, where there aren't any bats at all.

The virologists in Wuhan had to travel hundreds of miles to Southern China to collect samples from bats.

>>incrud+d2
I dont find that very plausible. There aren't really any places on earth with that many people AND that isolated from the rest of us. For it to be common among them for a long time without escape? I'm not buying it, at least at this level of discussion.

>>Milner+(OP)
SARS was a thing in China, so that's not surprising. The discussion is about SARS-CoV2. Now they are a few small mutations away that would be significant.

>>phkahl+g3
Also there is quite a lot of domestic travel within China, and it’s not that hard to connect via 1-2 people to a major Chinese city with international flights.

With how contagious we know COVID-19 to be, there is no way it started in Southern China and then infected a significant amount in Wuhan and only Wuhan first, of all places.

>>phkahl+g3
I'm not saying it could have spread "for a long time", I'm saying it spread undetected "for a while" in a region where significant immunity exists, thus causing no significant amounts of suspicious illness.

That is, the actual ground zero of the outbreak would be Southern China, where you would expect an outbreak of a novel coronavirus to occur, not Wuhan.

>>bobthe+p4
We don't actually know that it was "only Wuhan first". SARS-CoV-2 is believed to have spread worldwide as early as November.

Wuhan is the 9th largest city in China and also more "blue collar" than cities like Beijing or Shanghai, so the odds that the most visible outbreak of all would occur in Wuhan by chance alone aren't as low as you think.

>>Someon+h1
In the article there isn't any discussion of cause and effect, it is a probabilistic model. Eg. being near a virus lab makes it more likely it's a lab escape, being 1000km away from the main zoonotic reservoirs (bat populations) in China make it less likely it's of zoonotic origin. This is not to say it's impossible as researchers do travel 1000km from Wuhan to get samples from bats. I'll not comment on the probabilities they assigned to each hypothesis (they may very well be discounting the likelihood of zoonotic origins too heavily) but that is the approach they took.

>>incrud+Z2
The chief virologist heading bat research at the lab also was very surprised and gave an interview describing her efforts to see if it came from her own lab, being the only known store of bat viruses in Wuhan. Thankfully the genomic sequences were too far apart to make a direct jump credible so at the very least there must have been one intermediary carrier regardless. How the intermediary carrier, i.e. the pangolins, got it, either at bat caves in southern china or otherwise is the part still being explored. This may be the sort of thing where 100% proof is impossible, and a probabilistic answer is the best we will ever achieve.

>>Someon+h1
> It is like putting an earthquake lab in the middle of a seismically active area, then blaming the lab when an earthquake occurs.

This is a really bad analogy, though.

Seismic lab doesn't contain self propagating "seismic seed" that has the danger of being let loose and spread across the world, whilst virology lab _regularly_ handle dangerous pathogen.

The major reason people suspecting lab origin is not simply due to the existence of WIV next door. It is due to how the ccp purge information on WIV[1], have the lab taken over by the military[2], and the sentencing/disappearance of numerous civil journalists (陈秋实 Chen Qiushi, 李泽华 Li Zehua, 张展 Zhang Zhan are the ones that come to mind).

- [1](https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6181529370001)

- [2, Chinese](https://sa.sogou.com/sgsearch/sgs_tc_news.php?req=gNWjMh9kjp...)

>>bingoj+W9
The point is, the probabilistic model treats it as “very surprising” that the virus originated in a city where there is a virus lab. But that becomes less surprising if you consider that virus labs will often be located in cities at high risk from zoonotic outbreaks.