Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed • Hacker News Board

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#691

Post by wuwuno » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 3:35 AM UTC

aeturnum wrote: post #514

watertom wrote: post #452

A lot of smart people in this forum. Someone please explain to me how the Chinese were able to identify that that had a new virus. I’ve done pandemic drills with homeland security. They said they way you know you’ve got a new virus floating around is either new symptoms; significantly more “flu like” cases; significantly more cases escalating to pneumonia; increased deaths. Covid presents like the flu, so much so you…

> Early on there was not a spike in cases, so that would not have sparked an interest. My understanding on this was that doctors local to Wuhan noticed a surprising and sudden uptick in pneumonia that did not respond to antibiotics. The Chinese government managed this badly[1]. Your timeline doesn't reflect how things happened at the time - there was a "slowly" (over two months?) growing problem in Wuhan that locals…

Not in November when the Chinese first discovered the virus.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#692

Post by KMag » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 3:35 AM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #571

strogonoff wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An eerily prescient quote from a paper[0] published in 2015, two of the authors of which are with Wuhan Institute of Virology: > Understanding the bat origin of human coronaviruses is helpful for the prediction and prevention of another pandemic emergence in the future. China has clearly contributed valuable research into bat coronaviruses. They had all the motivation to look into these after the first deadly SARS. I…

> However, CCP’s resistance to a proper thorough study of the origins of COVID is IMO not exactly appropriate. It is, in fact, highly suspect. I’m not at all positive that it indeed leaked from a lab in Wuhan, but the fact they won’t let an independent investigation anywhere near it makes me lean more strongly towards that as a possibility. The description of the last investigation into the origins of the virus felt…

I think many bureaucrats everywhere view the press as an annoyance, but in places where they're used be being able to push the press around, pushing the press around becomes standard operating procedure even when there's nothing in particular to hide. Also, without a free press, nobody is incentivized short-term to dig deeper if a cursory investigation doesn't turn anything up. The end result is predictable stonewalling if a cursory investigation came up with nothing, even if the officials are pretty sure they have nothing to hide. (Also, due to incentives, it's harder for officials to be certain they really have nothing to hide.)

Having been in Hong Kong for just under a decade, I've seen several cases of bureaucrats making tone-deaf statements partly because they aren't used to dealing with a free(-ish) press. I have journalist friends, and I wish the relationship with the press were different, but bullying the press is less a sign of a cover-up when officials aren't used to dealing with a free press.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#693

Post by boomboomsubban » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 3:36 AM UTC

lamontcg wrote: post #682

boomboomsubban wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The problem I have is that China isn't interested in investigating the start of the pandemic. Why should they be interested? We know how SARS type viruses can spread to humans, we know what other species are vulnerable, and we know what things make it more or less likely. A new outbreak was not a surprising result. What benefit is there to aggressively investigating the exact transmission method? If your mink idea w…

That means that mink, and particularly the practice of mink farming is likely to lead to another outbreak (or whatever the actual species is determined to be). That animal would have sufficiently similar biology to humans, including the ACE2 receptor so that zoonotic transmission could happen. Those farms would definitely need to be closed.

I have not researched this mink idea, so I don't know how likely they are to lead to cross species contamination, but remember the swine flu? We already know pigs are capable of such transmission and we still farm them.

Lots of mammals are capable of this, and we can determine which ones are even if we don't isolate the cause of thie pandemic.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#694

Post by godmode2019 » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 3:39 AM UTC

The cause of this virus while concerning. Is nothing to the hysteria created from this virus, remember how this virus was branded at the start. Basically brave yourself for death, a interesting study is to look at news articles over time.

Its an example of bait and switch. This virus is not something that should have gained this much attention.

A bayesian inference shows that death when looking at a age stratification chart, who died compared with how many were expected to die in this cohort vs how many where expected to die were it a average flu outbreak in that same population.

I was building a model for local hospitals, with information back in march 2020. I grew disheartened when I realised that this killer virus was hardly more deadly than a bad flu year.

That brings up the excess deaths, why is it so high? Its hard to find good numbers in this, especially when you apply related increase in violent crime in 2020. Murders increases by 40% in NYC for example. More needs to be done to look into these numbers.

The death rate in all countries is died with, nor from. For example the UK lists all deaths who died within 30 days if a positive reading as a covid death. So to get the true numbers you need to apply a bayes model to see what we should have seen in a normal year.

A person over 70 has a 10% change if dying each year.

So if a virus that had no affect but turned your hair green killed 10% of people in an aged care home this would be branded as a deadly virus. Because of collerlation.

Now this virus kills much more than 10%, flu outbreaks have been reported to kill 12-16% of people in aged care homes. Covid is still more however.

I am now rambling, I have not squared the circle just yet. I still don't understand the hysteria, but it reminds me of post 9/11. Where people were acting crazy and full of anger.

I don't know what comes next, but I can tell you it won't be logical.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#695

Post by marcosdumay » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 3:39 AM UTC

throwawaygimp wrote: post #680

handmodel wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it Occam's razor? The Bayesian probability suggests the odds that it would evolve by chance AND first become an issue right next to one of the top three bat virus research centers in the world are pretty slim. It would be like a new mosquito disease first being an issue in human population next the CDC headquarters in Atlanta instead of somewhere in Africa of South America. Sure - there are mosquitos everywhere -…

If I were to build a bat virus research center... i'd put it close to where bats are. So these aren't independent. But your point is still a good one

Bats are everywhere.

The specific bats that host the ancestor of COVID-19 are quite a bit far away from those labs. The disease was first noticed near the labs.

Looking at the mechanics of the thing¹, I'd put a lab leak on similar odds of some village near the bats being infected and spreading it from there.

1 - I know nothing of their policy and competence to judge those.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#696

Post by jmspring » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 3:40 AM UTC

godmode2019 wrote: post #694

The cause of this virus while concerning. Is nothing to the hysteria created from this virus, remember how this virus was branded at the start. Basically brave yourself for death, a interesting study is to look at news articles over time. Its an example of bait and switch. This virus is not something that should have gained this much attention. A bayesian inference shows that death when looking at a age stratificatio…

Did your modeling take into account impacts on life due to lingering health issues for those that became seriously ill but did not die?

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#697

Post by tripletao » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 3:42 AM UTC

SiempreViernes wrote: post #648

tripletao wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In roughest form, Andersen is saying "SARS-CoV-2 doesn't closely resemble any existing known virus, so it wasn't produced by genetic manipulation of existing known viruses". I think that's true, but it ignores the possibility that the WIV was working with new viruses with unpublished genomes. The WIV routinely organized expeditions to remote bat caves to collect samples. There's naturally some delay between sampling,…

Well, we do have statements from the WIV that none of their samples closely match the earliest SARS-CoV-2, but we can just assume they are just outright lying, right? So, except for the fact that you must believe WIV did all these experiments in total secrecy (so that nobody outside heard of it while visiting, etc) and now won't admit to having done them, it's not a conspiracy theory.

I don't think it's reasonable to assume that they're lying, but neither is it reasonable to assume that they're telling the truth. When a lot is at stake, we don't usually take people at their word--financial statements are audited, nuclear facilities are visited by international inspectors, and so on. I don't see why this should be different, but the Chinese government has continuously obstructed any such attempt.

And again, RaTG13, the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, was sampled by the WIV in 2013 and published only post-pandemic. So it's unquestionable that they had at least one unpublished virus similar to SARS-CoV-2 in their collection; the only question is how many others.

It's likely that the only people who know the answer are under the physical control of the Chinese government. Even if they're sometimes briefly abroad, they likely have loved ones behind. So it doesn't take any voluntary conspiracy to keep them quiet, just a direction from a government that has amply demonstrated e.g. in Xinjiang its willingness and ability to punish anyone who discloses its secrets.

As I mentioned earlier, a proximal animal host would greatly increase my confidence that SARS-CoV-2 originated from natural zoonosis. Is there any evidence short of a direct admission from the WIV that would decrease yours?

Finally, Marc Lipsitch and David Relman are Harvard epidemiology and Stanford microbiology profs respectively. I'd rather people engaged seriously with the evidence than just relied on credentials; but are you saying they're conspiracy theorists too?

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#698

Post by acdha » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 3:45 AM UTC

kennywinker wrote: post #573

BeyondLimits99 wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. You don't just lock up a city full of 11 million people because they have the sniffles. The western world really dropped the ball with this one.

You don't go defcon 1 over the sniffles but you do go defcon 1 over an unknown virus that closely matches a highly lethal virus we encountered about ten years earlier (SARS classic). There is nothing in china's outbreak response that suggests guilt.

I think a lot of westerners want to believe the conspiracy theories in part because it’s hard to admit how much more we could have learned from SARS. Ignoring China, the Taiwanese government doesn’t take orders from them and certainly wouldn’t help with a cover up but because of SARS all it took was Li Wenliang‘s post leaking for them to activate a comprehensive response. The key part was recent memory overriding the “it’ll be awfully inconvenient” reflex which is hard to avoid when you’ve been comfortable for many years.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#699

Post by tripletao » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 3:48 AM UTC

s5300 wrote: post #567

tripletao wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In roughest form, Andersen is saying "SARS-CoV-2 doesn't closely resemble any existing known virus, so it wasn't produced by genetic manipulation of existing known viruses". I think that's true, but it ignores the possibility that the WIV was working with new viruses with unpublished genomes. The WIV routinely organized expeditions to remote bat caves to collect samples. There's naturally some delay between sampling,…

Not to go too off topic - but out of curiosity, wouldn't you consider something like the four pests campaign to be a much worse industrial accident in human history? Or is that stretching the definition of industrial a bit much.

Fair example. It feels different since the implementation was wrapped in more politics, since they deliberately intended a big ecological change (just a good one rather than a bad one). The root there was indeed a scientific mistake, though.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#700

Post by abacadaba » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 3:50 AM UTC

andrewflnr wrote: post #607

strogonoff wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An eerily prescient quote from a paper[0] published in 2015, two of the authors of which are with Wuhan Institute of Virology: > Understanding the bat origin of human coronaviruses is helpful for the prediction and prevention of another pandemic emergence in the future. China has clearly contributed valuable research into bat coronaviruses. They had all the motivation to look into these after the first deadly SARS. I…

My impression was that "lab escape" was conflated with "deliberate release" by conspiracy types early on, and once that took hold it became impossible to talk rationally about the accidental escape hypothesis.

Or conflated with that by people using it as a straw man to debunk more likely scenarios, your pick.