China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest • Hacker News Board

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#281

Post by Medicalidiot » Mon, Apr 13, 2020, 12:57 AM UTC

TechBro8615 wrote: post #204

Medicalidiot wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm annoyed with the connection between SARS-CoV-2 and bioweapon. This is such a garbage bioweapon for two reasons: This doesn't kill military aged men and it cannot be readily shut off. American scientists have nailed down when the cross over event occurred and how it happened. The world's top virologists also have said multiple times that this is not a bioweapon, people who have studied viruses for decades. But peo…

It could have escaped from the Wuhan lab and not been a bioweapon. The lab was studying viruses very similar to this one. It’s entirely possible that it leaked out of the lab by way of an accident. In fact, there is precedent for this happening in 2004. [0] Honestly I’m not sure how Occam’s razor doesn’t suggest that it was released accidentally from one of the only labs in the world studying coronaviruses in bats, g…

I'm going to go ahead and say probably not. Viruses that originate in animals spread to humans all the time. One time I had a patient who got pneumonia from lactobacillus gasseri. Do you know where that is commonly from? The lower reproductive system in women; the vagina. Pathogens find themselves all the time in humans that have an n=1. Why don't we constantly have pandemics? Because human to human spread requires very specific genetic changes for that to occur.

How often does this happen because someone was doing research on Coronavirus and it accidently got released from a biosafety level 4 lab? Not often. How often do novel Coronaviruses spread from bats to something to humans? All the damn time.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#282

Post by nikkwong » Mon, Apr 13, 2020, 12:59 AM UTC

irishcoffee wrote: post #268

nikkwong wrote: post #235

I'm trying to be a good bayesian reasoner here but the particulars of this specific case are all so tangled and piecemeal. The conspiracy theorists among us are having an absolute field day with the current events and it's easy to see why. According to my bayesian analysis, I believe that the most likely cause of this virus is a wet-market infection, followed by a slip-up at a lab, with—by high margin, in very very l…

The only reason I can possibly fathom as to why it would be nefarious would be trade. And that’s a stretch.

I'm totally willing to entertain that argument, but their exports have suffered tremendously and any forecasters could have predicted that a global slowdown would hurt such an interconnected country like China the most. So I am just unable to connect the dots here as to what the conspiracy theorists think the motive is.

Conspiracy theories that end up actually being true generally have one thing in common: they have wide consensus as to what the actual facts of the case really are. You could sort of make this argument for the conspiracy that Jeffrey Epstein's death was not a suicide but rather a cover up. In that theory, most theorists posit that high powered individuals whom Epstein had dirt on arranged to have him killed before he could get to trial and expose them. That's actually not a completely crazy theory, in the realm of how crazy some conspiracies really get.

Whereas, the 9/11 truthers cannot internally reconcile why the US government may have flown our own planes into the trade towers. No good singular theory emerges probably because not one exists. And of the theories that are floated, they all end up being conflicting and self-cancelling. I think time will prove that the same is true for COVID19.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#283

Post by boomboomsubban » Mon, Apr 13, 2020, 1:01 AM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #105

avs733 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So...evidence? Stating it's compelling isn't evidence, just that it is an explanation that appeals to large populations of our species who are hold certain suspicions. There is, however, a long history of animal to human transmission of diseases. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I have yet to see anyone provide evidence, only twitter rumors, and twitter rumors aren't even regular evidence.

Why is China reopening the wet markets if they know the virus came from there? I will let you ponder on that.

Because viruses jumping between species is a rare event? People didn't stop raising pigs after the swine flu, despite knowing the virus came from there.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#284

Post by boomboomsubban » Mon, Apr 13, 2020, 1:05 AM UTC

dependenttypes wrote: post #154

radicalbyte wrote: post #13

The the American leadership constantly calling it by the region name you can understand why an authoritarian regime would want to control discussion of the origins by experts. The risk is of their research being weaponized by said demagogues.

I was under the impression that they started intentionally calling it the Wuhan virus only after the Chinese government started making propaganda that the virus came form aboard.

Other way around. People started saying it was developed by the Chinese as a weapon almost immediately, and the originator of the "Chinese propaganda" specifically called out such claims before blaming the US.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#285

Post by knzhou » Mon, Apr 13, 2020, 1:07 AM UTC

dlubarov wrote: post #275

knzhou wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not both? Using your exact logic three times: - there's a 97% chance the CIA planted it in the seafood market - there's a 97% chance the CIA planted it in the WIV - there's a 97% chance the WIV made it Now it's obvious that something is going wrong here. There is no conceivable way these probability assignments can make sense. But your math was formally correct! What a mystery.

I threw out 1% as a seemingly reasonable prior probability that the outbreak came from the WIV, given an implicit assumption that the virus originated in China. Obviously I didn't put much thought into the exact number, but 1% seems within the realm of reason to me, given that the WIV is the only BSL-4 facility in China. It doesn't make sense to apply the same prior to "the CIA planted COVID-19 in the Huanan Seafood…

> It doesn't make sense to apply the same prior to "the CIA planted COVID-19 in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market", because there are many such markets in China, and only one BSL-4 facility.

I didn't make an error. The way the conspiracy theory goes in China is that the Military World Games [0] were held in Wuhan just before the outbreak. In other words, they knew the US military was in Wuhan specifically (in fact, right next to the seafood market), just like you know that WIV is in Wuhan specifically. The two conspiracy theories really are equally credible, by which I mean they're both bullshit.

The reason is because of this assumption you made:

    P(my favorite conspiracy theory) = 0.01
    P(outbreak in 14km radius | my favorite conspiracy theory is false) = 1/3,000

Because 1/3000 is so much lower than 1/100, you're essentially assuming from the start that your favorite conspiracy theory (insert "WIV" or "CIA" or whatever else here) is a much better explanation than all other possible explanations combined, because all of them combined can only total up to a likelihood of 1/3000. In other words, you rigged the game to support your conspiracy theory from the start. I was trying to point out how similar rigging can be used to justify any conspiracy theory.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Military_World_Games

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#286

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Apr 13, 2020, 1:21 AM UTC

Medicalidiot wrote: post #273

surge wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easily contained by shutting down the economy and social distancing... You didn't read a thing I said did you? You're calling whats happening now, easy? Did you even read what happened to the naval ship that got infected? This has had pretty disastrous effects for the economy of the entire world, there are food riots overseas right now, the unemployment rate is skyrocketing. The social disorder alone, cops are a…

>You're calling whats happening now, easy? I'm saying that the response to COVID-19 is easy. You know why? Because all it would have taken is surveillance and proper quarantine. I'm going to say it again: if you give me a normal amount of resources and a normal team I would be able to manage anyone with COVID with reasonable success. Now it starts getting tricky with any serious comorbidities and luckily we have neph…

[deleted]

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#287

Post by fspeech » Mon, Apr 13, 2020, 1:28 AM UTC

andromeduck wrote: post #53

gerdesj wrote: post #16

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. Simp…

Natrualy occuring viruses escape from labs all the time, particularly in China. Infact SARS is known to have escaped twice in Beijing. That the virus originated zoonotically does not precude a lab accident + leak theory of origin in fact we know that one of the labs actively experimenting on bats there was within half a kilometer of the market. You combine that with a significant fraction of the first known hospitali…

I don't know where the "within half a kilometer" meme came from. Wuhan Institute of Virology is about 13.5km from the market by road or 30 minutes by car. And the two are separated by the Yangtze river: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/12D2/production/... (in case one wonders the source of the map is BBC https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/simp/chinese-news-51388024)

With Wuhan's population it would not surprise me if there are millions who live or work closer to the institute than the market.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#288

Post by meowface » Mon, Apr 13, 2020, 1:29 AM UTC

papermachete wrote: post #83

meowface wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? That's not how evidence works. The onus is on the person making the claim to provide positive evidence. Not actively insisting they have to prove a negative.

That's just appeal to perfection, proving a secret military base got away with corona would make you more effective than CIA and MI-6 combined. However, China has hundreds of documents of this base and backgrounds on all scientists, which it can release to no detriment at all, supposing the lab had nothing to do with corona.

Asking for any evidence is appeal to perfection? Or saying that it's unreasonable to demand an extraordinary, serious, world-impacting claim be disproved, while simultaneously not supporting it with any evidence?

Also, I'm just saying any evidence that anything may have escaped by mistake; not that it was intentionally spread. Sure, CIA and such can discover such evidence much more effectively than any commenter here, but in that case, shouldn't you let the CIA / US government make those accusations instead of a random commenter who has no knowledge of the situation or basis for their claim?

>China has hundreds of documents of this base and backgrounds on all scientists, which it can release to no detriment at all, supposing the lab had nothing to do with corona.

What documents, exactly? And how would that help disprove that the virus inadvertently escaped from the lab?

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#289

Post by legolas2412 » Mon, Apr 13, 2020, 1:31 AM UTC

throwanem wrote: post #272

legolas2412 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your answer. I'll like to point out that 3 is slightly eased off if the two viruses are already able to jump to humans. In this case, it could be the SARS coronavirus and the pangolin virus whose receptor proteins are similar to ncov19. Then all that is required is for the two viruses to jump over and then recombine. Definitely a possibility. I find the wet market theory full of such improbabilities too. H…

Compared to other families of viruses, coronaviruses recombine unusually often and are unusually likely to produce viable new strains that way. Those traits make them unusually capable of producing zoonoses, which is one of the reasons why they're a subject of particular interest among infectious disease researchers. Those same traits also produce a high degree of similarity between a lot of genomically differentiabl…

Thanks that was very educational.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#290

Post by throwanem » Mon, Apr 13, 2020, 1:33 AM UTC

legolas2412 wrote: post #289

throwanem wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to other families of viruses, coronaviruses recombine unusually often and are unusually likely to produce viable new strains that way. Those traits make them unusually capable of producing zoonoses, which is one of the reasons why they're a subject of particular interest among infectious disease researchers. Those same traits also produce a high degree of similarity between a lot of genomically differentiabl…

Thanks that was very educational.

Happy to! I hope it's been useful.