Almost no theories can be "ruled out" in this space. Viruses evolve in crazy and essentially unobservable ways.
Nonetheless, we know there was a close relative documented in bats on the same continent within a comparable timeframe. The clearly obvious hypothesis is that animal transmission was the vector, for the simple reason that this is the way every single other pandemic, human or otherwise, has happened. There is nothing unique or notable about covid from the perspective of viral evolution. Period. So Occam says we go with the simplest theory.
Attempts to wave away that fact have nothing to do with science about what was happening in Wuhan and everything to do with modern political opinions about a government 1000km away in Beijing.
Occam's Razor doesn't really apply to this one, because each side has different priors on which theory is actually the "simplest."
Given that, as far as I know, we don't have a single human case documented before those in Wuhan - something which a) should have been likely and b) China would be highly incentivized to root out since it would disprove the lab hypothesis, it implies patient zero was probably in Wuhan. If that's true, Occam could cut the other way, since the notion that case zero of a virus making a species transition would just so happen to occur in a city with a virology lab doing research on the same kind of viruses is a bit hard to believe.
Wuhan is a gigantic city, bigger than NYC. You'll be able to find an example of nearly anything in any category there. But it's also completely unsurprising they were researching the coronavirus category: the 2003 SARS outbreak was a coronavirus too, and obviously motivated an incredible amount of research across the world, but particularly in China.
Given that coronavirus would not be observable until there is a cluster of symptomatic cases in a city (and a doctor with relevant experience who can observe multiple cases - here 李文亮), I find it highly unlikely that we could observe earlier cases, if they spread less rapidly or outside a city - or even within another city with less institutional knowledge.
> b) China would be highly incentivized to root out
Even if so, this doesn't form part of any prior. China being incentivized to act in that situation, doesn't affect how likely or unlikely that situation was.
> China being incentivized to act in that situation, doesn't affect how likely or unlikely that situation was.
China being incentivized to find evidence supporting the CCP's desired image absolutely does affect how likely it would be for such evidence to surface if it exists.
We see virtually no such evidence; we can assume that's not because China's lack of trying to find it; which should adjust our prior against such evidence existing at all. Yes?
My belief is simply that there is no such evidence.
Reasonably convincing evidence, to me, would be:
- genetic precursor virus particles which have died and no longer exist - they are extinct, or,
- dated blood samples with immunological evidence of infection, sufficient that it isn’t just tampered/false positives. There’s no reason to expect this would have been collected.
i.e. if you haven’t collected it by 2019, there is never going to be any evidence.
This also answers your sibling commenter: it’s not in China’s interest to publicise any such search, when the odds of discovering anything (even if there were earlier infections) are vanishingly low.
After thinking about this statement a bit, I must also admit the possibility that it did not originate in a lab yet finding evidence that it did not is still very difficult. That said, I still think that CCP's default strategy to cover up everything and shroud the truth is now hurting it more than if they were just honest and straightforward about what really happened.
The point is that even if we didn't observe such cases originally, given the incentives now, I would have expected China to investigate and surface evidence of such cases, even if circumstantial. So your second point is not a real point: the incentives don't determine the likelihood of it occurring, but they do dictate the likelihood of an investigation to determine if it did occur.
Are they incentivized to do that? Remember they’re dealing not just with The west’s opinion, but also home opinion, where I don’t know that documenting that they should have found this weeks earlier would go over well. Not to mention I think they’re happy with the current local conspiracy theory that this was actually the US’s fault. It also seems likely that a big city especially one with a big lab would be more likely to be able to identify that the disease going around was new
I'm not an expert on China but I would generally assume that the consequences and reputational damage of being seen as responsible by the rest of the world for COVID-19 would outstrip nearly any other possible consequences being mitigated against by not seeking to clear themselves.
> we don't have a single human case documented before those in Wuhan
The disease spread all over the world before people discovered the first cases, so it's not very surprising if previous cases on a less developed area than Wuhan were ignored.
Well, sure, but my point is that now that people are suspecting it was the lab, we ought to expect China to be digging furiously for evidence of an earlier case. At least so far, I haven't heard of any such evidence.
Willful ignorance is the first posture I would expect from the CCP - that would be the specific avoidance of gathering evidence that would be embarrassing if found to exist.
The second posture I would expect (if the first posture was not takwn) is that if they did seek and find evidence of particularly embarassing variety, they would actively stonewall access to awareness of that evidence and do everything they could to suppress that evidence. The statement,
>we ought to expect China to be digging furiously for evidence of an earlier case
is prima facie either incorrect or irrelevant to whether your ever becoming aware such evidence exists.
China does not possess Western democratic institutions, (however flawed as even those might be), to achieve accountability. To wit, over here on the Western side of things, it’s going to be hard enough getting NIH to examine whether NIH funded this work in contravention of US gov mandates not to (see HHS Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight (P3CO) Framework, 2017).
> Given that, as far as I know, we don't have a single human case documented before those in Wuhan - something which a) should have been likely
Um... why? The virus has to jump species somewhere. If the first documented case was in Shanghai, you could make the same argument.
I think what you're trying to say is that the jump had to have happened in Yunnan, because that's where that particular bat sample was found. But that's not what the data says at all. The Yunnan virus was a relative, not an ancestor. There are uncounted millions of wild coronavirus strains we don't see for every one we sequence. There is no reason at all to believe that some Wuhan-local bat, say, had a related strain that became the covid ancestor. Or some other species, etc...
Again, that's the way viruses evolve. It's the way pandemics start. It's the way pandemics have always started. Demanding that this is somehow a crazy engineered virus dropped on us by a despotic foreign government is... how pandemics start in bad movies.
Your comment was rightly flagged because you broke the site guidelines and took the thread a big step further into flamewar hell. Please don't do that. Please do review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting to HN.
pg knows as well as anyone else that if someone makes an attempt to paint you into alignment with a right-wing conspiracy theory, they're probably doing it with ill intent, especially if you made no such claim.
If you want the HN guidelines to be consistent, they shouldn't demand people presume good faith when the tactics of cancel culture are wielded in threads to try to tag people with the label they are promoting right or left wing conspiracy theories, which can direct a mob in their direction if not strongly pushed back against.
The guidelines are consistent. You should have replied to the argument instead of attacking the other comment. If you had simply posted your sentence "The claim is not that [etc.]" and omitted all the name-calling, your comment would not have been flagged and it would have been more persuasive too. By packing it with insults, you discredit your own point. By the way, that's one of several less-obvious reasons for presuming good faith even when you don't feel like it.
I agree with you that the GP swerved into a strawman at the end and shouldn't have. Indeed they broke the site guidelines there ("Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.") But piling on with grossly worse violations is exactly the wrong thing to do in such a case. If you have a better point, you should serve it properly by keeping your cool. Assuming you're in the right, doing otherwise just discredits the truth, and that actually causes harm.
“ it is widely believed that the virus was leaked to the public in a laboratory accident (may have been kept frozen in some laboratory beforehand).[4][5][10][11][12][13][17][19”
And on top of that, the original SARS leaked from Chinese, Taiwanese, and Singapore labs a minimum of 4 times.
So parent’s cited statement is false and does not apply.
Occam's Razor indeed. The lab in Wuhan was studying bats and coronaviruses. Animal transmission is completely consistent with a lab leak, especially given that the virus in question is transmissible before symptoms.
Actually occam's razor would say that the many many many more instances of bat-human contact throughout the Chinese countryside are likely responsible, not a lab leak.
Did you know that people use Bat Guano (literally bat shit) eyedrops to cure visual ailments in rural china? Among other risky practices. Bat guano is often handled with bare hands and used to fertilize fields without proper sanitary practices. The many tens of thousands of these events that happen everyday are a MUCH more likely scenario.
> And despite the tens of thousands of people rubbing bat turds in their eyes the first cases come from people living in the middle of a massive city.
Uh... yeah. Because massive cities have, y'know, more people mixing together with more varied activies. It would be very surprising indeed if a new pandemic just happened to pop up in a tiny hamlet in rural Tibet. But cities are absolutely where we expect to see this happen.
> The clearly obvious hypothesis is that animal transmission was the vector
Except nobody has been able to identify that animal. With SARS it was quickly determined to be civets, with MERS camels. With Covid, more than a year on, we still don't know.
We also know that a very closely related strain of the virus was being studied in the only BSL 4 lab in China, located less than a mile from the meat market where the virus supposedly originated.
But the distance inside China is the equivilant of a known bat virus in a remote location somewhere in Budapest, where only farmers live, and ground zero of the virus beeing downtown London streetfood market.. (were all the food and everything tested negativ..)
You don't think bats exchange viruses between Budapest and London? That's nothing. Viruses in interacting populations are routinely continent wide.
Let me flip this around: do you have even one example of a virus within a compatible species spectrum that does not expand across continent scales over the "few year" timeframe we're discussing?
Nonetheless, we know there was a close relative documented in bats on the same continent within a comparable timeframe. The clearly obvious hypothesis is that animal transmission was the vector, for the simple reason that this is the way every single other pandemic, human or otherwise, has happened. There is nothing unique or notable about covid from the perspective of viral evolution. Period. So Occam says we go with the simplest theory.
Attempts to wave away that fact have nothing to do with science about what was happening in Wuhan and everything to do with modern political opinions about a government 1000km away in Beijing.