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.
https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak
The official cover-up initially was blaming the outbreak on contaminated meat from a wet market.
Perhaps it is not special. One might as well ask what was special about a coin that lands heads three times in a row in its first three flips.
What I'm claiming is that the volume of attributed escapes indicates that the average escape has relatively local consequences. In other words: historically, when everything goes wrong, it hasn't resulted in a global pandemic. What, then, made or makes COVID special?
Maybe the answer is raw numbers, and that it was bound to happen eventually. But "one of these incidents was bound to cause a global pandemic" is the exact same reasoning as the (original, still mainstream?) "wet market" theory. What I'd personally like to know is why I should believe one over the other, apart from human propensity to believe conspiratorial claims.
Is this actually true? It is certainly not true for HIV, and of course is not relevant to diseases like Zika that are transmitted by mosquitos.
Edit: I found the answer to my own question: https://www.kff.org/infographic/ebola-characteristics-and-co... (see second bullet point). Given that this lists Hep C, HIV, Influenza, Malaria, Polio, and Tuberculosis as possible to transmit while asymptomatic, I'd say "COVID-19 is one of the few serious diseases that can transmit when the carrier is asymptomatic." is most definitely false.
You can catch flu from an asymptomatic person, but Covid has a much higher reproduction factor. During the winter lockdown in England, regular flu was completely eradicated - literally not a single case was detected in entire England [0]. At the same time, Covid was still spreading happily. The measures that stopped flu in its tracks only slightly inconvenienced SARS-Cov-2.
Covid is simply too good at spreading, compared to other similar diseases.
(As an analogy: I can swim, Michael Phelps can swim, we can both call ourselves swimmers, but we are not really comparable.)
[0]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/flu-cases-covid-en...
Covid is asymptomatic and mild enough in enough people that masks get political
The problem I have is that China isn't interested in investigating the start of the pandemic. They've thrown away their wastewater samples, there's some evidence WHO found of SARS-CoV-2 spreading locally prior to December 2019, but no backtesting of any samples. Nobody seems to be looking at the bats in Hubei for sarbecoviruses.
By blocking study of the zoonotic origin of the pandemic, they can use the theory it was imported in food for domestic propaganda. For external propaganda they're happy to have conspiracy theories flying about this lab leak theory creating a "firehose of falsehoods" and distractions. They can rely on American scientists to get engaged with the conspiracy theory and debunk it, wasting their efforts and then they can use that also for domestic propaganda.
Meanwhile nobody gets fucking outraged that China isn't properly investigating the origin of the virus and isn't aggressively looking at the bats in Hubei and any animal farms in the surrounding area. My suspicion is that animal farms (like minks) functioned as a bioreactor that had many opportunities to spillover from bats and then the close contact allowed it to spread well and mutate to optimize it for a more human-like ACE2 receptor, then the mink contact with humans allowed multiple spillover events until it started to spread epidemically in humans.
It's purposely evolving diseases to spread faster or be more dangerous, for the sake of research. As I understand, it's at least a bit controversial. So maybe there's not as much of it going on as other research? If so, there probably wouldn't be as much opportunity for it to escape. But now that it has (per the hypothesis), it's ready to be very contagious right out of the gate. Thus, pandemic.
I would expect such a case to make the headlines, but it's quite possible it would be quietly swept under the carpet. How well known was Reston back when it happened? If that didn't make the news, would a lab-originated outbreak?
With COVID, a worker could get infected, hide the exposure out of fear/shame, never show any symptoms... and yet start a pandemic.
With a low-probability high-impact event like a global pandemic, near misses are the only indicator you have until the one time it does go catastrophically wrong.
"In 2014, after a series of accidents involving mishandled pathogens at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the NIH announced that it would stop funding gain-of-function research into certain viruses — including influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) — that have the potential to unleash a pandemic or epidemic if they escaped from the lab. Some researchers said the broad ban threatened necessary flu-surveillance and vaccine research."
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00210-5
p.s. The US NIH did ultimately stop funding that research locally, but continued funding it in Wuhan. Including the exact type of virus we're dealing with now.
My understanding is most other countries don't have wet markets like China does. Even if a virus escapes, it may not have access to the hosts it needs truly become problematic.
That also makes the biological warfare scenario less likely — armies like to control where the bomb goes.
The other factor to discount this conjecture is that if you hear about covid as a biological weapon, it’s less likely to be true as it would potentially expose research in other places. If China is doing this, the US, Russia and others are too.
From what I've read Ebola has killed many healthcare professionals because they infected themselves when disposing off PPE. As a result a disproportionally large portion of deaths were healthcare workers.
> With COVID, a worker could get infected, hide the exposure out of fear/shame, never show any symptoms... and yet start a pandemic.
In many countries workers are actually incentivised to come to work sick and infect others.
Why should they be interested? We know how SARS type viruses can spread to humans, we know what other species are vulnerable, and we know what things make it more or less likely. A new outbreak was not a surprising result. What benefit is there to aggressively investigating the exact transmission method?
If your mink idea was found to be accurate, would you advocate closing mink farms? It being the source this time doesn't make it likely to cause the next transferrable virus.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
While I have you: could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=community%20identity%20by:dang...
However in my opinion, chinese governments (esp. lower levels) like to lower the severity of any issue / risks and they like to repress / solve the issue with local power until it is solved or gets too big. The central gov that like to hide wrongdoings aren't helping either.
In case of covid, they either underrate the severity or tried to suppress the outbreak locally, which they failed and it already spread too wide enough to be contained.
If covid outbreak happened in europe or us, I believe it'll spread almost the same, albeit slower and you'll knew faster since it'll be in news faster.
SARS-COV are classed Category C pathogen by CDC, in line with Hanta virus. SARS-COV is documented as a viable bioweapon, precisely for the things we have seen in the last year, and studied as such by all capable militaries around the world.
The hypothesis is that this lab (and labs in Iran, China and Iran share biowarfare research) was conducting gene-targeted coronavirus research. Using proxy DNA-testing companies serving Western populace to get their data. A good weaponized coronavirus would have an extremely high R. It would look similar to the flu in the first stages. Then at a later stage (after two weeks) it would deliver a "payload" in the brains of the targeted populace, stopping breathing or causing haemorrhage. The non-targeted races would just have a flu and contribute to the spread. Other engineered viruses focus on plausible deniability, straining the hospitals with patients with vague symptoms, hard enough to visit the hospital and contribute to the strain on public services, soft enough not to actually kill them. It would throw the targeted country into chaos and unprepared for a war.
To show my point, even if we aggressively investigate the source and discover it did not originate in a lab, nobody would then argue that it's alright to lower security on such biolabs.
Which wouldn't that be in China's interest?
I don't get why the 'cover up' (maybe i'm too biased with that term, utter lack of cooperation) beyond just the top down controlling nature of the CCP.
Their actions don't lend us any trust so we do have to ask why..
https://www.wsj.com/articles/possible-early-covid-19-cases-i...
Knowing whether it was a lab leak or zoonotic would be a massive hint in the direction to invest in. N=1, but it's a big 1 that would have massive public support.
There is also the matter of biosafety levels. Something like smallpox is studied at biosafety level 4, which is very intrusive and difficult. The alleged gain of function research would have been BSL 3 or even 2, meaning a lot fewer precautions are taken, and a leak is correspondingly more likely.
They are acting without any concern for the outside world - not for how they are perceived, not for any consequences. They are acting with pure self-determination. This works because they know they can be self sufficient and have a long term plan to get there.
Controlling the information/narrative domestically is the only variable they need to manipulate that matters. So as an outsider, it all seems quite inexplicable, but if you see it as a way to achieve long term political and infrastructure goals while maintaining social harmony locally - most of their actions make sense, even if they may not be morally justifiable to some/many/all people in some/many/all situations :)
So we should be aggressively researching all the known possible future causes, not wasting time trying to figure out what the exact cause this time was.
>Knowing whether it was a lab leak or zoonotic would be a massive hint in the direction to invest
We know both are possible causes, investing in just the one that caused this leaves us open to the other.
And just for domestic propaganda reasons. If it came from China they could be blamed for it, and they want to deny/deny/deny and defect blame. Serves their propaganda purposes to have people believe it was imported and generates an us-vs-them bunker narrative where the rest of the world is unfairly blaming them. That leaves their citizens questioning the rest of the world and not their own government.
Lots of mammals are capable of this, and we can determine which ones are even if we don't isolate the cause of thie pandemic.
So the answer to "What makes COVID special?" is possibly "We failed our pandemic save."
I did some research during the early stages of the West African Ebola epidemic, when a lot of people were asking why, instead of the usual sporadic, self-limiting outbreaks of the past, we were seeing something larger and different. As it turns out, if you use the parameters people estimated from the older, smaller outbreaks, there's a small but not breathtakingly so probability of a very large epidemic. It's sort of the null hypothesis for pandemics.
It's not exceptional in many of the ways viruses can be. It's not as deadly as Ebola. Or as durable as Norovirus. Or as transmissible as Measles. It's just...really good at its job.
The lack of fomite transmission for SARS-CoV-2 has saved a lot of healthcare workers.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/06/28/8839000...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/world/asia/china-coronavi...
etc.
SARS-CoV-2 also spreads exceptionally well on mink farms. Out of a total of 128 mink farms in the Netherlands, at least 69[0] had an outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 in 2020, with more suspected cases. On at least two farms, there were confirmed transmissions from the animals to farm workers. It is likely mink would form a natural reservoir SARS-CoV-2 if allowed to spread in the wild.
Mink farming has subsequently been banned since early 2021 in the Netherlands.
[0]: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/coronavirus-covid-1... (Dutch)
The idea that this thing sprang out of the wild, in Wuhan of all places, perfectly adapted to infect human beings, is fucking laughable.
Of course, all this allows the media to disclaim the party’s responsibility for basically everything.
Also, yeah; they view China as a self-determined empire stretching back 5000 years. The Chinese generally view Americans as arrogant children and not that smart. I suggest any white person who doesn’t understand racism go to China — they don’t give a fuck that you’re white and in many places will actively disdain you. If you tried to date a Chinese woman outside the large coastal cities you’d likely be literally run out of town. They are reaching the point where they don’t really need us; their own internal consumption is overtaking their exports to the US.
(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...
Chernobyl is a great example of this with deadly consequences. COVID is far worse sadly.
I don't think we could have contained it within China if they had a best response it was already out - well maybe 99.99% chance a not that educated guess - but we could probably have given ourselves a good amount more time. And hard shut down borders quickly if we knew the true vast numbers & death rates in early Wuhan. Then put out the 'embers' locally.
Gives at least some countries a chance of keeping it under control within their borders. Though I don't have faith our (US) CDC would have been up to the task...
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".
Due to the timing, the general consensus is that the husbands contacted the disease from one male (close hugging or extended talking) and then gave it to their wives that night.