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Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

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Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#621

Post by boomboomsubban »

arcticfox wrote: post #555
boomboomsubban wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not arguing to stop science, I don't see the benefit we're hoping to get out of aggressively researching various theories about how exactly the 2019 covid virus spread to humans.

Why would we not "aggressively" research it? What if we could have stopped it by catching it early? 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.

>What if we could have stopped it by catching it early?

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.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#623

Post by oliv__ »

krallja wrote: post #512
watertom wrote: post #452

A lot of smart people in this forum. Someone please explain to me how the Chinese were able to identify that that had a new virus. I’ve done pandemic drills with homeland security. They said they way you know you’ve got a new virus floating around is either new symptoms; significantly more “flu like” cases; significantly more cases escalating to pneumonia; increased deaths. Covid presents like the flu, so much so you…

Please read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang

Oh gee, what a shame that he died of Covid, at the young age of 33. A tragic coincidence

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#624

Post by btilly »

dang wrote: post #467
btilly wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly there are a bunch of people voting down anything that is too critical of China. WHY there are a bunch of people voting that down I leave to others to speculate. But I'm going to vote up any verifiable factual statements that have been voted down.

HN has plenty of people who feel strongly on both sides of this issue. In my experience there are many more on your side than the other (probably by an order of magnitude)—certainly the number of times I've had to moderate comments breaking the site guidelines on China-related topics is over 10x lopsided, and no we're not looking to moderate one side more than the other. (Just the unpleasantness of being accused of u…

I agree with all of that.

However the fact that all of the Chinese supporting votes showed up at once, and then the others show up slowly is supportive of a group of people working together.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#625

Post by unishark »

nickt wrote: post #528
gregwebs wrote: post #397

This is a great article explaining why a lab leak should always be a suspect. The alternative theory is that a virus traveled on its own (via bats or other animals) from bat caves 900km away to Wuhan where there are 2 labs researching bats. One of the labs is lesser known but is right next to the seafood market and the hospital where the outbreak was first known. [1] This article points out that a lab outbreak could…

It’s probably important to point out that a “lab leak” is a result of human-clumsiness or similar, and not the sci-fi movie bad guys engineering a virus. A lot of the non-HN crowd don’t get the difference.

That would certainly be the most likely kind of lab-based hypothesis. Especially considering the overt flouting of rules people engage in for other kinds of animal research, in the rush to compete for results and publications.

But it would still result in heads rolling and a constant stream of embarrassing revelations. Consider the Fukushima investigation. Every revelation of bad process and ignored warnings is another news cycle with everyone outraged at them. "Bad luck" is something you are not forgiven for if there's any negligence to point at.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#626

Post by jackweirdy »

sparrc wrote: post #594
watertom wrote: post #452

A lot of smart people in this forum. Someone please explain to me how the Chinese were able to identify that that had a new virus. I’ve done pandemic drills with homeland security. They said they way you know you’ve got a new virus floating around is either new symptoms; significantly more “flu like” cases; significantly more cases escalating to pneumonia; increased deaths. Covid presents like the flu, so much so you…

Flagged for misinformation. There definitely was an uptick in deaths and pneumonia. Scans of patient's lungs showed new symptoms not normally associated with pneumonia. This happened over the course of a few months and is what tipped off doctors in Wuhan that there was something new spreading.

And another point that cements this was the Reddit “china_flu” subreddit’s creation in December 2019, when word was spreading outside China that _something_ was spreading, probably flu, and nobody knew what

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#627

Post by SkyMarshal »

andrewflnr wrote: post #607
strogonoff wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An eerily prescient quote from a paper[0] published in 2015, two of the authors of which are with Wuhan Institute of Virology: > Understanding the bat origin of human coronaviruses is helpful for the prediction and prevention of another pandemic emergence in the future. China has clearly contributed valuable research into bat coronaviruses. They had all the motivation to look into these after the first deadly SARS. I…

My impression was that "lab escape" was conflated with "deliberate release" by conspiracy types early on, and once that took hold it became impossible to talk rationally about the accidental escape hypothesis.

That's been my impression too fwiw. There's now a large segment of people who are primed to immediately accept the conspiracy theory over the Hanlon's Razor principle:

"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity (or accident)".

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#628

Post by reducesuffering »

the_cat_kittles wrote: post #272
reducesuffering wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Empirically, HN collectively gets things like this right much more often than not. It’s been right about the coming pandemic as early as beginning of Feb, it’s been right about masks when it was dismissed by CDC, and lab leak hypothesis has been dismissed as crank the whole time while building more and more of an implausible case that it wasn’t lab-leaked. HN has been coming around to that too. Of course, nothing is…

ive been here for a decade... its my opinion that HN very much does NOT get things like this right more often than not. its very hard to even guage what the hn opinion is to begin with

> "its very hard to even guage what the hn opinion is to begin with"

Not sure how to square this with the fact you're saying HN collectively gets it wrong. Either you can't even determine what it is they're getting wrong or you're exceptionally good at gauging what the HN opinion is. Because of your quote, I'll assume you're not accurately gauging what HN's majority opinion is on issues, because it's "very hard." I spend a lot of time here and don't think it's difficult at all. While there's a lot of debate and disagreement, most issues have fairly clear >2/3 majorities.

Classically liberal, anti-trumpism, climate change urgently needs addressing, anti-BigTech, static typing, Rust/Go > Java/C#, anti-CCP, anti-surveillance, pro-encryption / pro-privacy, pro-fasting, pro-lifting, decriminalize drug use, pro-rationalist, crypto mostly snake oil, more Twitter use/discussion than IG/Snap/TikTok though it's less popular, etc.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#629

Post by btilly »

gregwebs wrote: post #397

This is a great article explaining why a lab leak should always be a suspect. The alternative theory is that a virus traveled on its own (via bats or other animals) from bat caves 900km away to Wuhan where there are 2 labs researching bats. One of the labs is lesser known but is right next to the seafood market and the hospital where the outbreak was first known. [1] This article points out that a lab outbreak could…

This article points out that a lab outbreak could have happened in the United States and many places in the world.

In general, yes. In this case, no so much.

The feart that it could happen here is why the USA restricted gain of function research in 2014. And only reopened it in 2017 with stricter safety controls.

If China had made the same policy decisions, would COVID-19 have become much less likely? That's an important question to answer. Whether or not it DID happen that way, as a planet we need a more consistent way to evaluate such risks.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#630

Post by bgandrew »

ping_pong wrote: post #549
aeturnum wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Early on there was not a spike in cases, so that would not have sparked an interest. My understanding on this was that doctors local to Wuhan noticed a surprising and sudden uptick in pneumonia that did not respond to antibiotics. The Chinese government managed this badly[1]. Your timeline doesn't reflect how things happened at the time - there was a "slowly" (over two months?) growing problem in Wuhan that locals…

Pneumonia is both bacterial and viral. It wouldn't be surprising if it didn't respond to antibiotics. It was the CT scans of the lungs that showed glassy nodules that was the new symptoms.

Majority of pneumonia cases are caused by bacteria though (see https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/differentiating-viral-from-bac... )
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