China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

I remember a scientific paper on HN a few months ago by Chinese authors saying Covid came from that lab and that it came from bats that had infected workers there, or that was the assumption. That is my memory of the article. I cannot find that paper anymore. Does anyone remember this?

Same thing happening now with Hydroxychloroquine.

Lots of interesting articles on how it might help. Media decides it’s a political football. No more articles

I don't buy the escaped/released from a lab theories espoused here and on Facebook and the like. Apparently the mutations within the SARS-COV-2 found in humans compared to the bat virus are purely random and hence the thing is not or very unlikely genetically engineered. My source is a recent New Scientist article. So the bloody thing is simply a virus that affects all people, everywhere, without fear or favour. Simply ...

Pretty much all stats I've seen relating to this thing are painfully awful. Here in the UK (in England), care home deaths are not reported in the main death stat etc etc ad nauseam. Scotland reports in its own way as does NI (or not bother) compared to England and Wales. We have minimal testing anyway so who knows what is actually going on?

Anyway, one thing I am absolutely certain of is that whilst the stats in Europe and the US, CA etc are a bit wonky at best they are at least a decent attempt to have a go at reporting the situation.

I think that the CN and other results that are so way off the curve that other nations and territories are reporting are complete fiction and dangerous fiction at that.

My favorite theory is that the Wuhan virus lab created the virus and used bats in experiments. One bat escaped and infected other bats that eventually ended up on the wet market in Wuhan. Edit: a more plausible theory is that one researcher got bitten by an infected bat and chose to hide this fact.

Agreed, there's basically no current evidence to suggest it was engineered, and plenty of evidence to suggest it was zoonotic and evolved naturally. One possibility that can't be totally ruled out is that maybe this was one of many viruses collected from local animals which their virology lab had stored for current or future study, and some kind of mistake led to it escaping, perhaps through an employee unknowingly getting infected or taking home something with a contaminated surface.

edit: Rewrote everything below here to make my probability beliefs more clear.

I think it's extremely likely to be zoonotic and not spread by anyone intentionally. As for the chance it was an unintentional lab escape, it's difficult to assess what the probability of that may be.

I don't think you can just simply assume "virology lab in proximity = likely source of outbreak" without looking at a lot of other factors. Wuhan is a massive city and economic hub, a lot bigger than NYC and the surrounding area. From what I've heard, there's basically every kind of facility and institute one could imagine there.

It could be a coincidence that the lab was there due to the size, density, and economic importance of the area.

Or maybe the lab could've been established there because they knew the area was biologically diverse and close to many species of animals carrying viruses which could jump to humans, and that such animals were commonly hunted and sold for food there. If that's true, then it would be a confounding variable, and one would expect outbreaks to be more likely to occur near the lab regardless of whether they originated in the lab.

There appear to be other potentially credible pieces of evidence which may support the lab escape hypothesis, but I think the whole case needs to be analyzed very robustly and carefully, with all of the possible priors and evidence taken into account.