3 ms·

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 t

• Throwawayaerlei 7y ago
  It comes from the fact there's a Wuhan Center for Disease Control that's across the river from the Institute for Virology and much closer to the wet market. Which is mentioned in the fine Daily Mail article, which gets a whole lot of basic facts correct, or nearly so (it differs in the distance it claims between the Center and the wet market, and the number of days that it took for the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center to be closed by the Chinese Communist Party for "rectification" after they broke the embargo on publishing genome sequences; would that any Western researchers show as much courage as those did). And that Wuhan CDC has BSL-3 labs, although the Daily Mail passes on the entirely plausible rumor that bat coronavirus research was being done at both locations in BSL-2 labs. Lots of scientists all over the world do research in labs that aren't really at the level that should be used for what they're doing, the higher the level, the more obnoxious and difficult it is to do anything. A security/convenience trade-off we should be all to familiar with.