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Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic

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Re: Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic

#181

Post by tripletao »

chimprich wrote: post #149
dangom wrote: post #13

Conspiracy theories aside, Worebey's Science paper is not unanimously well received by the scientific community, and the data analysis was shown to be partly flawed. Here's a discussion on inference pointing to references and sources that argue against the results of the paper: https://inference-review.com/article/thunder-out-of-china It also raises eyebrows the fact that no animal has ever been found to be positive…

> It also raises eyebrows the fact that no animal has ever been found to be positive for COVID, in contrast to all of the previous SARS pandemics. This doesn't really mean very much. It took something like 15 years to find the bat population likely to have been the source of SARS-CoV-1. It's not like we were able to say definitively how the spillover began; it's all probabilities. We have found similar viruses to SAR…

> It took something like 15 years to find the bat population likely to have been the source of SARS-CoV-1.

This is true but misleading. It took a long time to find the reservoir host (i.e., the animal in which most of the virus evolved) for SARS-1, but the proximal host (i.e., the animal that actually infected the first humans) was found within about a year.

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2004/01/who-sees...

Based on the WIV's pre-pandemic research, we knew immediately that the reservoir host of SARS-CoV-2 is bats. We still haven't found the proximal host. It's almost certainly not pangolins, and Nature eventually published an extensive correction to their pangolin paper.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.07.184374v2

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2313-x#change-his...

Re: Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic

#182

Post by jpeloquin »

The practice of plotting case maps like this started during the 1854 cholera epidemic. The cholera case map helped discredit the theory that cholera was transmitted by miasma, and supported the theory of fecal-oral transmission. Just some related history that you might find interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outb...

Re: Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic

#183

Post by chimprich »

mullen wrote: post #161
chimprich wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The one thing that makes me think the Lab Leak theory is true is that the Chinese government very very strongly denies the story ...well, yes, of course they do. But they would also strongly deny the story if they thought it was untrue. > Anytime the Chinese government reacts very negatively to a story (Denial, attacking, undermining, deflecting), it usually means the story is true. So if they don't react negativel…

> ...well, yes, of course they do. But they would also strongly deny the story if they thought it was untrue. Then why would block any investigation from outside the Chinese government? If anything, if the Lab Leak theory is provable false, they should be inviting outsiders to investigate and waste their political capital/time/energy. If your advisories want to spin their wheels on something that is not true, then le…

> Then why would block any investigation from outside the Chinese government?

I can easily believe that the Chinese government, not exactly known for its openness, would be keen to block investigations into their bio research labs, regardless of what happened in Wuhan.

The potential upsides are few - would any doubters be silenced if the investigation found nothing?

I can also believe that even if they have no reason to believe that the lab leak theory is true and their internal investigations have turned up nothing, that they're not entirely convinced there is zero chance there wasn't a lab leak.

Even if they think there's only a 1% chance there was a lab leak, then the idea of an outside investigation is clearly dangerous to them. Blocking an investigation is safer.

Re: Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic

#184

Post by anigbrowl »

AlanYx wrote: post #174
anigbrowl wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course I'm referring to the linked paper. If you are not seeing such discussion perhaps you should read it more slowly. It's early in the Results section. The clustering of COVID-19 cases in December around the Huanan market (Fig. 1, B and C, insets) contrasts with the pattern of widely dispersed cases across Wuhan by early January through mid-February 2020 (Fig. 1, D and E), which we mapped using location data fr…

Sorry, I'm not understanding how what you're quoting there relates to Fig. 2(B). That's a reference to a separate Weibo-based data analysis that has no link at all to Fig. 2(B).

It's not my job to read the paper and look at the figures for you. Try putting the maps side by side and realizing they show the same geographic area.

Fig 2B is an exemplar, as is clear from the description: 'Schematic showing how cases can be near to, but not centered on, a specific location.'

Re: Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic

#185

Post by edm0nd »

azinman2 wrote: post #99
edm0nd wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CCP lies about everything from its GDP numbers to COVID infection rate and deaths. You simply cannot believe anything the Chinese government puts out.

This is largely from the NIH.

Who gets the information from.....the Chinese government.

Re: Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic

#186

Post by dang »

hammock wrote: post #153
dang wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(This is is unrelated to your comment, just the username) Trollish usernames aren't allowed on HN because they effectively troll every thread they post to. We've learned that it's better to deal with this earlier than later, so I've banned the account. Happy to rename and unban it if you want to pick a more neutral username. This is a borderline case—we don't want to be prudes—but I suspect most readers would rather…

Dang I wanted to hear their reply

You can see posts by banned accounts by turning 'showdead' on in your profile.

Re: Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic

#187

Post by tripletao »

lamontcg wrote: post #180
manv1 wrote: post #118

One problem in these kinds of investigations is that nobody involved really wants the truth to be known. The lab isn't going to let anyone poke around and see what it was doing until the CPP falls. And even then records have probably been wiped already. The problem is that there really isn't any evidence. SARS-COV-2 has never been detected in any Chinese land animals associated with the market. We know that birds can…

> SARS-COV-2 has never been detected in any Chinese land animals associated with the market. They acted very quickly to sterilize the market which eliminated the evidence. In SARS-1 the market associated with that was allowed to operate until investigators were able to take samples from the animals there and find the related virus. As a containment measure this was probably the right reflex to have, as an investigati…

> In the case of SARS-1 the actual progenitor virus was only found 10 years later in bats in Yunnan.

Why do you keep saying this? As you know, the closest animal viruses to SARS-1 were found in civet cats and raccoon dogs, within about a year of its emergence in humans.

The bat viruses that Dr. Shi later discovered are scientifically important, because most of SARS-1's genome probably evolved in bats. They provide no new insight as to how the virus came to infect humans, though.

Re: Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic

#188

Post by lamontcg »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #154
manv1 wrote: post #118

One problem in these kinds of investigations is that nobody involved really wants the truth to be known. The lab isn't going to let anyone poke around and see what it was doing until the CPP falls. And even then records have probably been wiped already. The problem is that there really isn't any evidence. SARS-COV-2 has never been detected in any Chinese land animals associated with the market. We know that birds can…

In Dr. Birx's recently released book she claims to have known it came from a lab origin from the start, based on evolutionary reasoning. As she describes: A virus takes years to learn/evolve the ability to infect humans, and does so poorly at the start. But covid was extremely effective at infecting humans "right out of the box." In a lab environment the virus is repeatedly exposed to human cells and gets better at i…

> In a lab environment the virus is repeatedly exposed to human cells and gets better at infecting human cells with each iteration.

That is just replicating what nature does when it hops from individual to individual. Nature has billions of animals to do serial passage through.

And we still don't know that the species jump happened in the market, and I'm somewhat skeptical of the claims of this author. I tend to think it was circulating in rural Hubei, probably coinfecting domestic animals and people, getting better and better at infecting people until the market event happened which was where it found a densely packed human population where it spread with R0 significantly greater than 1 and took off. There's no evidence of that though because when the grandparents of farmers in rural villages die of pneumonia nobody bothers collecting samples because that's normal.

And we only noticed it when it started to efficiently infect human beings because that is when the pandemic started. The initial poor cryptic spread between humans and animals before that wouldn't have been detected because poor spreading couldn't cause the pandemic to start.

And we know that its possible for the virus to jump backwards and forwards between humans and minks, so the idea that an intermediate animal reservoir would have been infected with this virus and would have repeatedly attempted to jump to farm workers until it finally got good at spreading in humans is not that far fetched at all. Then the intermediate animal host becomes a massive bioreactor in close contact with humans, giving it many opportunities to roll the dice until it finds a combination that unlocks its pandemic potential, and then the first time it was transported into a dense human population it takes off.

There could be a hundred other viruses in animals in China all knocking on the door, occasionally infecting humans and not being good at it all right now, happening every day in China. This one was very good at infecting humans, along with being very good at infecting all kinds of other animals (mink, deer, dogs, cats, etc) because in order to cause a pandemic it had to be good at that, if it was bad at that it wouldn't have happened. It is like the anthropic principle--the virus seems incredibly lucky, because it had to be.

Re: Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic

#189

Post by lamontcg »

tripletao wrote: post #187
lamontcg wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SARS-COV-2 has never been detected in any Chinese land animals associated with the market. They acted very quickly to sterilize the market which eliminated the evidence. In SARS-1 the market associated with that was allowed to operate until investigators were able to take samples from the animals there and find the related virus. As a containment measure this was probably the right reflex to have, as an investigati…

> In the case of SARS-1 the actual progenitor virus was only found 10 years later in bats in Yunnan. Why do you keep saying this? As you know, the closest animal viruses to SARS-1 were found in civet cats and raccoon dogs, within about a year of its emergence in humans. The bat viruses that Dr. Shi later discovered are scientifically important, because most of SARS-1's genome probably evolved in bats. They provide no…

WIV-1 can directly infect humans. So did civit cats and racoon dogs give us SARS-1 or did we infect them (or backwards and forwards as in the case of SARS-CoV-2 and mink)?

If you go back a few months before the pandemic outbreak in humans and there's a zoonotic jump to civit cat and raccoon dogs then I don't think you can usefully call that the reservoir species. It existed and evolved for decades in bats, which I'd call the reservoir. The jump to the intermediate animal I'd consider to be part of the pandemic mechanism (unless you can find SARS-1 in samples from a decade previously in those animals).

[ And another way to say this is why do we bother calling out an "intermediate species" when discussing pandemics? ]

Re: Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic

#190

Post by AlanYx »

anigbrowl wrote: post #184
AlanYx wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I'm not understanding how what you're quoting there relates to Fig. 2(B). That's a reference to a separate Weibo-based data analysis that has no link at all to Fig. 2(B).

It's not my job to read the paper and look at the figures for you. Try putting the maps side by side and realizing they show the same geographic area. Fig 2B is an exemplar, as is clear from the description: 'Schematic showing how cases can be near to, but not centered on, a specific location.'

I'm trying to be civil, but you keep making statements about the paper that are objectively not correct. Fig. 2(B) does not show "second stage cases (mostly reported around January and February)" as you posted earlier. The map from the Weibo analysis is not shown in the paper, so one can't "put[] the maps side by side". Moreover, it's irrelevant to claim that a Weibo analysis of second stage cases not shown in the paper is relevant to the interpretation of figures in the paper that are not limited to second stage cases.
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