China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

Post by katbyte » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 11:29 PM UTC

bb2018 wrote: post #181

markdown wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because people have to eat, and wild animals are only a tiny fraction of what's traded in wet markets. US supermarkets sold lettuce that killed people. Should those supermarkets be shut for good?

If the lettuce killed people and then everyone who interacted with the people who at the lettuce also got sick and the economy had to be shut down the United States would strictly ban selling lettuce immediately. If China can enforce the largest lockdown ever and enforce a one-child policy for decades, they can easily ban live animals at markets.

Post by lbeltrame » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 11:30 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #120

gnusty_gnurc wrote: post #8

In lieu of evidence that the “wet market” story is true, the accidental lab release is pretty compelling. Interesting to see how people react to it though - as though the idea is outlandish that a laboratory working with pathogens from actual bats could mishandle things. Is there even any evidence people ate bats at the wet market?

You don't need to eat bats for them to be a problem. The virus could have jumped via some intermediate host. Some folks used to be skeptical wrt. the market being a source, because it was officially described as a fish/seafood market and fish are not a very plausible reservoir for this virus. However it's clear by now that all kinds of live animals were sold there, similar to other "wet" markets throughout Mainland C…

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 11:30 PM UTC

taiwanboy wrote: post #163

knzhou wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those international flights were allowed to let countries evacuate their own citizens out. If they were banned, you would be making the exact same complaint but reversed: "China held other countries' citizens hostage in Wuhan." Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

China didn’t let taiwanese citizens leave Wuhan then. What’s the excuse there?

Post by chunghua » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 11:31 PM UTC

Razengan wrote: post #90

Tinfoil hat: I'm not keeping active track, but I passively perceived a sheer drop in mentions of the fact that Wuhan has China's first "biosafety level 4" laboratory, coinciding with an increased lambasting of the US's handling of their infections in the general media (" The Wuhan virus is now the American virus "), along with a streak of random US-critical posts (" What is the worst thing the US government has done?…

Post by throwanem » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 11:32 PM UTC

jotakami wrote: post #172

PeCaN wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "coronavirus escapes from a lab, in the exact area where the outbreak started, that was studying coronaviruses" is exactly an 'extraordinary claim'. If anything it's the elephant in the room. Are we just supposed to casually ignore that or what…. I think the problem is that when people think of "lab" they think of some sort of devious genetic engineering bioweapons program, and not something considerabl…

Yeah that’s what I’ve been trying to explain to all my reasonable friends who think that the moment I say “it came from a lab” that means this is a bioweapon that was intentionally released. No, actually, there is a chain of evidence that makes an accidental lab leak more plausible than the theory that the virus jumped straight from an animal in a wet market hundreds of miles away from its normal habitat that just ha…