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First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

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Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#391

Post by klabb3 »

fragmede wrote: post #210
Apes wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit different. The GPS restriction was to prevent GPS on a device moving over 400 mph (I think that's roughly the speed?), and to limit accuracy to within a few meters rather than a few centimeters. The restrictions were intended to prevent the use of civilian GPS systems in precision missiles. Not a lot of civilian uses require anywhere near that speed or accuracy. It's a lot harder to justify grossly inaccurate g…

you're referring to the CoCom Limits on GPS receives, which limits functionality when the device is moving faster than 1,900 km/h aka 1,200 mph) and/or at an altitude higher than 18,000 m (59,000 ft), so you can't build a home made ICBM with it. Technically it's supposed to be and and not or , and high altitude amateur aerial ballonists tend to hit that flight ceiling, and so have a list of chipsets they can use in t…

I never understood how this works, at least effectively. Isn’t this just a device DRM? If you can build an ICBM you can probably hack a gps receiver, or build an unlocked one, no? If that encryption key is in every gps device, surely it must be available on eg darknet. And thus you could use existing gps infrastructure (ie avoid the expensive part of launching your own satellites). What am I missing?

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#392

Post by peteradio »

jjulius wrote: post #341
NotYourLawyer wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really relevant here though.

They are replying directly to a tangential comment that someone else made. It might not be relevant to this overall thread, but it's relevant to this particular comment chain.

Did any of the 3 researchers in question have something that would make them more likely to get seriously ill?

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#393

Post by notahacker »

lamontcg wrote: post #266
baja_blast wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 40,000 wet markets in China as of 2019 And yet it happened to spillover in a wet market in a city with the premier coronavirus research labs in the country. It also happened to happen far away from where these types of viruses originate. There are only a handful of labs in the county that do this type of research and WIV is the top one. So why did not not appear in a wet market in Yunnan or Guangdong?

Guangdong was SARS-CoV-1. We've had two spillovers now of sarbecoviruses and the first one hit a completely unrelated city. The other one happened in Wuhan, which is the biggest city in central China and its "catchement area" is probably fairly wide around it. It does appear that they spillover in wet markets in big cities. The level of coincidence here may look like rolling a 1d20 two times and the second time getti…

> The level of coincidence here may look like rolling a 1d20 two times and the second time getting a natural 1.

Or a more related and much bigger coincidence: a man was killed by a nerve agent in what appeared to be a targeted attack on the home of a Russian defector approximately 10 miles from the UK's main lab studying nerve agents. Which is a similar distance between the Wuhan lab and wet market, though the UK version is a rural backwater rather than a major regional capital. Sometimes relative geographical proximity coincidences are just that. (if you think there's something to the geographic proximity of Porton Down to the Salisbury poisonings, you have to try to explain away an even more remarkable coincidence that two Russians protected by the Russian government took a very short holiday to 'see the cathedral' and somehow stumbled into the same boring suburb the nerve agent was left in on the same day. And the decision of presumed target Sergei Skripal to live there... )

Wuhan would look like less of a coincidence if it had been accompanied by a characteristic Chinese coverup "the researchers have retired and wish to spend their time not talking to the media" rather than something very uncharacteristic of a Chinese government coverup (scientific papers releasing data on origins which unconnected non-Chinese virologists and epidemiologists generally find credible) or if China had been way out ahead rather than miles behind in their vaccine efforts.

Lab leaks are enough of a known phenomenon not to be ruled out as wildly improbable, but the coincidence of the virus that leaks out of the Wuhan lab happening to be one they hadn't documented and happening to plausibly spread from an epicentre which contained the other most likely vector for the transmission of zoonotic viruses in Wuhan sounds... pretty much as big as the coincidence of a zoonotic virus being in the same major city as a lab for studying zoonotic transmissions of similar viruses prevalent in that large region.

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#394

Post by lockhouse »

wk_end wrote: post #320
mensetmanusman wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roll an N-sided die representing all possible locations for possible human/bat human/animal interactions. What percentage of those facets are city centers near level 4 bio labs that research these types of viruses?

FWIW my understanding is that the labs were only BSL-2.

> Prior to and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, coronavirus research at the WIV has been conducted in BSL-2 and BSL-3 laboratories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#395

Post by hindsightbias »

Reason077 wrote: post #286
ZoomerCretin wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You won't have to wait long for confirmation. Confirmation that they were sick. Not confirmation of what they were sick with.

Given the location, the timing, the symptoms, the severity of the illness (it's unusual for 'flu to put healthy young adults in hospital) I think we can be pretty confident in our guess.

> unusual

Except that’s not true. Chinese culture is different.

"There is no culture of staying at home for minor symptoms," he said. "When people feel sick they all go to hospitals, which may easily crash the healthcare system."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-63944861

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#396

Post by ajross »

mistermann wrote: post #315
ajross wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It is perhaps noteworthy that this is the writing form that a lot of mainstream news articles take (advantage of?). I also am not a fan of it, but I must confess I do enjoy seeing it used in the other direction.

> It is perhaps noteworthy that this is the writing form that a lot of mainstream news articles take (advantage of?).

No, no way does a serious paper go to print with a source like that. There's room for argument about the use of anonymous sourcing, but there's a huge difference between "someone involved in the decision process" or "with knowledge of the events" (commonly used descriptions) and what the authors did here, which amounts to "someone who works for the US government anywhere, but we won't tell you their expertise".

But yes: a lot of it is about trust. We trust editors at NYT and WaPo to make sure their journalists know who their sources are and not to lie or spin about them. And while, sure, sometimes this process breaks, on the whole it's worked very well for a very long time.

Throwing it out the window so that someone can get clicks on substack posts, or (worse) because you don't like the political implications of the trusted journalism, is a really bad idea. A world of Fox and Substack, where "sincerely held opinions" take the place of "truth", is sort of a disaster.

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#397

Post by FormerBandmate »

wk_end wrote: post #320
mensetmanusman wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roll an N-sided die representing all possible locations for possible human/bat human/animal interactions. What percentage of those facets are city centers near level 4 bio labs that research these types of viruses?

FWIW my understanding is that the labs were only BSL-2.

That is probably what caused the leak

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#398

Post by FormerBandmate »

geuis wrote: post #225

I don't trust this article at all . > Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were members of the Wuhan lab suspected to have leaked the pandemic virus. > It is unclear who in the U.S. government had access to the intelligence about the sick WIV workers, how long they had it, and why it was not shared with the pub…

The Sunday Times, one of the oldest, most reliable newspapers in the world, says the same thing. It was probably a lab leak

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/inside-wuhan-lab-covid-pa...

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#399

Post by hindsightbias »

geuis wrote: post #225

I don't trust this article at all . > Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were members of the Wuhan lab suspected to have leaked the pandemic virus. > It is unclear who in the U.S. government had access to the intelligence about the sick WIV workers, how long they had it, and why it was not shared with the pub…

It never ceases to amaze me how conspiricists don’t believe anything the government says, but the instant something is congruent they’ll upvote it like wildfire.

It makes me question any aspect of “rationalism”

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#400

Post by NotYourLawyer »

object-a wrote: post #345
NotYourLawyer wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a lot more interested in how we weren’t allowed to talk about it for a couple years than whether or not it’s ultimately true.

The President of the United States was claiming that COVID was engineered in China as early as May 2020. I don't know how someone can claim they weren't allowed to talk about it.

And people called him racist for it. And anyone else who speculated that the obvious, simplest answer might be true was likewise considered racist.
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