zlacker

> I’ve always believed this was an lab accident by a technician that needed their job so they covered it up until they and too many family members got sick and it was obvious something was wrong.

Really drove me nuts how early on everyone, everyone was working overtime to try and dismiss the possibility that this was some sort of lab leak. I’m sorry but the way China went absolutely DEFCON 1 (welding people into their apartments, blocking the roads out of town, nightly fumigations of public spaces) within a short period of time strongly suggests that they had a “oh crap, _that thing we were working on got out_” moment. Never understood why people were so eager to dismiss this possibility.

>>xienze+(OP)
Absolutely.

You don't just lock up a city full of 11 million people because they have the sniffles.

The western world really dropped the ball with this one.

>>Beyond+o2
You don't go defcon 1 over the sniffles but you do go defcon 1 over an unknown virus that closely matches a highly lethal virus we encountered about ten years earlier (SARS classic).

There is nothing in china's outbreak response that suggests guilt.

>>kennyw+7d
I think a lot of westerners want to believe the conspiracy theories in part because it’s hard to admit how much more we could have learned from SARS. Ignoring China, the Taiwanese government doesn’t take orders from them and certainly wouldn’t help with a cover up but because of SARS all it took was Li Wenliang‘s post leaking for them to activate a comprehensive response. The key part was recent memory overriding the “it’ll be awfully inconvenient” reflex which is hard to avoid when you’ve been comfortable for many years.

>>acdha+vA
It wasn't Li Wenliang's post that activated the Taiwanese response. It was the Chinese government's public alert on 30 December 2019 about a cluster of patients with "pneumonia of unknown etiology" that triggered the response.

>>Diogen+tc1
That announcement came after top Taiwanese medical officials had seen those social media posts, realized how serious they looked, and started asking China about them.

https://www.ft.com/content/2a70a02a-644a-11ea-a6cd-df28cc3c6...

https://www.ocacnews.net/overseascommunity/article/article_s...

> In the wee hours of Dec. 31, 2019, CDC deputy chief Lo Yi-chun could not sleep and was scrolling his phone when an online post shared in a CDC chat group caught his attention.

> Quoting information from Chinese websites, the post that appeared on PTT, one of Taiwan's largest internet bulletin board systems (BBS), warned about the potential danger of a SARS-like disease that was spreading in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

> "The post came out (on PTT) at 2 a.m., and at 3 a.m., I saw it being shared on a chat group by another sleepless CDC doctor," Lo said at a press conference Thursday.

> Lo said the post immediately caught his eye because unlike other unsubstantiated online messages this one included a chest CT scan, a hospital test result and what appeared to be a screenshot of messages sent by a doctor to his colleagues, warning them of a highly contagious virus.

>>acdha+Qq1
> That announcement came after top Taiwanese medical officials had seen those social media posts, realized how serious they looked, and started asking China about them.

The first announcement from the Chinese government came on 30 December 2019, one day before the events described in your second article. ProMED-Mail sent out an alert on 30 December 2019,[1] and the next day, the outbreak was even reported on CCTV.[2] Social media posts gave additional information, but the existence of an outbreak of likely viral pneumonia was publicly declared before those posts, and people who follow emerging infectious diseases were following the story.

1. https://promedmail.org/promed-post/?id=6864153

2. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-pneumonia-id...