7 ms·

Epidemiologist Ellie Murray said it better than I could, so I’ll just quote her: “Yes, the chance of a virus like SARS-CoV-2 suddenly arising is fairly low. Tha

by mjirv 6y ago

Epidemiologist Ellie Murray said it better than I could, so I’ll just quote her: “Yes, the chance of a virus like SARS-CoV-2 suddenly arising is fairly low. That’s why we have so few pandemics!! But conditional on being in a pandemic the chance that the virus that arises to cause it is like SARS-CoV-2 is super high!! There’s no conspiracy, just statistics”[0] That said, the fact that the outbreak started so close to the Wuhan Institute of Virology is certainly suggestive that it escaped from the lab, though that doesn’t mean it was necessarily “man made.” [0]https://twitter.com/epiellie/status/1281960135796101120?s=21 https://twitter.com/epiellie/status/1281960135796101120?s=21

m0zg 6y ago
> But conditional on being in a pandemic the chance that the virus that arises to cause it is like SARS-CoV-2 is super high!! This will be misinterpreted by everyone who doesn't understand the Bayes rule (which is 99.999% of the population). What she's saying is just a fancy version of "this is the kind of a virus that would likely cause a pandemic", nothing more.
xster 6y ago
> certainly suggestive that it escaped from the lab, though that doesn’t mean it was necessarily “man made.” https://www.iesdouyin.com/share/video/6823589225980644623 https://www.iesdouyin.com/share/video/6823589225980644623 Dr Fauci said it better than I could, so I'll just quote him: "hahahaha"
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
bmitc 6y ago
> the chance of a virus like SARS-CoV-2 suddenly arising is fairly low I don't know if misleading is the right word, but this isn't the whole story and could in fact mislead people. What we should be taking from this breakout is that although potentially not that likely, they are becoming more and more likely. What's bothering me is all this focus on the wrong things. We need to already be preparing for the next spillover event for the next virus, but that isn't even close to being on the table, much less discussed or even mentioned. We shouldn't and can't be treating this as a singular event, but many are. I learned this from the below article: http://nautil.us/issue/83/intelligence/the-man-who-saw-the-pandemic-coming http://nautil.us/issue/83/intelligence/the-man-who-saw-the-p... >> Are spillover events more common now than 50 years ago? > Yes. EcoHealth Alliance, an NGO, and others, looked at all reported outbreaks since 1940. They came to a fairly solid conclusion that we’re looking at an elevation of spillover events two to three times more than what we saw 40 years earlier. That continues to increase, driven by the huge increase in the human population and our expansion into wildlife areas. The single biggest predictor of spillover events is land-use change—more land going to agriculture and more specifically to livestock production.
IAmEveryone 6y ago
To quote Feynman: "I just saw a car with the license plate <some random string with no meanimng>. The probability of that happening is far lower than being hit by lightning! As to the laboratory being close: it wasn't accidentally located in Wuhan. The city is the regional centre for a region that only recently expanded into somewhat pristine nature. With ongoing and constant encroachment of natural habitats, there is far more contact between wild species and humans than there is in Europe/North America, or even other Chinese regions.
- polynomial 6y ago
  Source for your rate of contact claim?
- zaroth 6y ago
  Feynman is making a joke which people who understand priors would get, but you’re using the punchline as if it means something. If Feynman had guessed the plate number before seeing it (say, written a research paper identify the exact number ahead of time) then something miraculous indeed just occurred.
  - Izkata 6y ago
    Fun example time! Sylvia Browne's book End of Days predicts a pneumonia-like illness that spreads around the globe in 2020. Published in 2008. Additional details do not yet match what's happening, though.
iask 6y ago
Well, sadly, the damage is done. And it has certainly exposed our unpreparedness, broken/outdated protocols among agencies and exposed deep divisions in these United States. Just imagine if this is a test case, we’ve really exposed ourselves. I am quite certain our adversaries are watching and learning.
- magicsmoke 6y ago
  If this was a dress rehearsal for a WW2 repeat it certainly doesn't look good. In 1941 the US had enough societal fabric to conscript every fighting age man and send everyone else to the factories to make munitions for 4 years. Today, the US can't even get people to agree on using face masks and staying 6 ft away from each other for a few months. As a percentage of the population more Americans have died from covid than the Vietnam war. The wartime comparison is apt.
- noelherrick 6y ago
  No, sorry. The US was prepared, we just have an administration that failed us and an entire political party that cares more about short-term politics than protecting its citizens. We have to reform our system because it should not be possible that someone like Trump is head of the executive or Mitch McConnell is head of the Senate. Arguing counter factuals is hard, but I entirely believe we could have whipped this thing had we competent, good faith governance.
  - Lendal 6y ago
    Yeah we've been tracking it and preparing for it since 1918. There's a whole industry built up over the years around preparing for this, but it still requires leadership involvement to put it into action. The leadership we have now believes in ideologies, conspiracy theories and blame. All they had to do was stand on the shoulders of science and let it work, as many previous administrations have done to prevent pandemics from becoming catastrophes.
    - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
      USA and UK both reportedly took actions to stop funding pandemic response infrastructure, removing stockpiles and failing to fix known failures. The chances of both countries doing this just before a global pandemic seem similar to the chances that there's a virus lab in a Chinese mega-city that saw some of the first cases. So, it's proven Trump and Johnson are secretly Chinese operatives working as part of a covert group hellbent on destroying Capitalism with engineered viruses!!1one /s
throwaway326429 6y ago
> But conditional on being in a pandemic the chance that the virus that arises to cause it is like SARS-CoV-2 is super high!! This statement is a distraction from the main question. The question is: conditional on being in a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, what is the probability that the virus arose through purely natural processes, vs. the probability that it escaped from a lab. I am not equipped to assess the biological evidence, but I do know this: The virus came out of Wuhan, the location of a top safety level (BSL-4) lab that experiments on coronaviruses. It is China's first BSL-4 lab, and one of a small group of such labs worldwide. This alone suggests that the probability of a lab escape is not negligible and should be taken seriously. In fact, without considering additional evidence I would argue this puts the probability of a lab escape above 50%. But again, I am not familiar with nor am I equipped to assess the biological evidence. In addition, if the virus did escape from a lab, both the Chinese government and the bio scientific community are clearly and highly incentivized to keep this fact a secret. Therefore, when a member of one of these groups argues that this is not a lab escape, this serves as very weak evidence in favor of natural evolution. The incentive to keep such an outcome a secret is so strong, that I would argue we should discount such statements altogether and focus on the actual evidence.
- fabbari 6y ago
  There is something about this way of reasoning that seems faulty to me.The reason the Wuhan laboratory was studying coronaviruses in the first place is that there is a large reservoir of the virus in the area. In other terms: diamonds are hard to find, but where you find diamond mines you also find diamonds, ergo: diamond mines must create diamonds.
  - throwaway326429 6y ago
    This is why I prefer thinking about the goal of this discussion as estimating probabilities, rather than as coming up with a logical argument that has a definite conclusion. I agree that the presence of a large virus reservoir in the area shifts the probability in favor of a natural process. I don't think it is enough to make the probability of a lab escape negligible. As a followup, I would ask: How many such reservoirs are there, how close are they to human population etc., and therefore what is the probability that the virus came out of this particular one? How many of these BSL-4 labs are located next to such reservoirs? etc. All with the goal of estimating how likely a lab escape was. I would like to emphasize that (1) it is important that we know the truth, because it will inform our preparation for future pandemics, and (2) there is sufficient evidence that warrants a serious look at the possibility of a lab escape. Instead of dismissing it as a "conspiracy theory", or leaving it all to the biologists, I suggest taking considering all the evidence and trying to estimate these probabilities.
jkhdigital 6y ago
> the chance that the virus that arises to cause it is like SARS-CoV-2 is super high This statement obscures and oversimplifies, which is unfortunately what scientists sometimes do when speaking to the public because they assume people won't understand otherwise. When she says "like SARS-CoV-2" she is not speaking about the physical structure of the virus, she is really just referring to general qualities that a virus would need to display in order to reach pandemic level: high infectivity, unusual disease progression for which proper treatment is poorly understood, frequent and unpredictable mutation, etc. What the researchers in this paper have done is identify the unusual components of SARS-CoV-2, i.e. the proteins and their physical structure, which give it this pandemic potential. And then they describe a sequence of research papers, published by virologists from the WIV, which demonstrate awareness of the characteristics of these exact features as well as a laboratory capability to produce chimeric viruses with these exact features. And the epicenter of the pandemic is a stone's throw away from the laboratory where those virologists work. If you're going to make a hand-wavy argument about real-world events using Bayesian inference, you need to be prepared to explain why certain evidence is independent of your prior. Or drop the argument.
- mjirv 6y ago
  It is worth clarifying that she was not responding to this paper specifically, just to general arguments of the type “this must be man made because it has so many features that make it well-suited to spread in humans.” The fact that researchers in Wuhan were studying (some of?) these features is stronger evidence when combined with the location. However, it also seems reasonable that features of viruses researchers study because of their likelihood to increase human transmission would show up in a naturally occurring virus with a lot of human transmission.
  - dahfizz 6y ago
    > However, it also seems reasonable that features of viruses researchers study because of their likelihood to increase human transmission would show up in a naturally occurring virus with a lot of human transmission. You are letting language get in the way here. Researchers at Wuhan weren't studying "features" of viruses, they were studying what happens exactly when you insert X amino acid at Y location and how that can affect the structure of Z protein. And that exact, one in a billion, never before seen mutation happens to occur randomly right next door to them?
addicted 6y ago
This is the same stuff that causes conspiracy theories around airplane crashes. The conspiracists go “It must be a conspiracy because there are like these 6 redundant safety mechanisms and the odds of them all failing at the same time are extremely low”. But the answer is obvious. If the 6 redundant mechanisms hadn’t failed, the plane wouldn’t crash. So as long as the odds of failure of each redundant system is not 0%, every plane crash that ever happens will look the same, with multiple redundant items with extremely low likelihood’s of failing, failing together.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dahfizz 6y ago
  This is not the same thing IMO. Imagine Russia announced last week they had a airplane hacking tool that could crash any 747 by using sonic waves to rattle some bolts loose making the wings fall off the plane. If tomorrow, 3 different 747s crash all because their wings fell off, would that be suspicious? You could say "well it was a plane crash, something had to go wrong". But things went wrong in a very specific and unique way that is directly linked to another nation. It's the same here. The researchers are showing incredibly specific modifications to protein structure and DNA. It's not just "oh wow, this virus is very virulent". It's "oh wow, this virus has a handful of never before seen mutations, all of which were being studied in Wuhan, where the virus began".
  - muzika 6y ago
    Would it be any different if FIRST the 3 planes had crashed, and then a few weeks AFTER that, the hacking tool was announced?
- Aeolun 6y ago
  Is this often the case? I have the feeling that in most aircraft crashes it’s always a major structural failure, or pilot error/confusion. Not often do I hear that all 6 redundancies failed at the same time.
gmuslera 6y ago
The odds of having a particular order in a deck of cards is very low, but the cards have one of them anyway. I think you are looking at the odds from the wrong place. Could have been a pandemic with a simpler virus, too.
dboreham 6y ago
There are virus labs all over the place so this could be a birthday paradox. There's one here in rural Montana (the data we quote often about sars-cov-2 survival times on surfaces was generated there).
- hobofan 6y ago
  There are not that many BSL-4 labs worldwide, and especially in China (they only have 2).
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Unsurprisingly one of those is in a city of 19 million people next to a reservoir of coronaviruses that already caused epidemics.
    - bb2018 6y ago
      I've had some trouble understanding this claim though. From my understanding the bats that the virus most likely came from are thousands of miles away from Wuhan. This also is the area that the Wuhan researches went every year to collect samples. My understanding of Chinese geography is a bit weak - but it is a bit like if a cow disease broke out in Boston near a BS4 lab. There are certainly some cows in Boston a few blocks from the BS4 lab there. Sure - there are cows in Massachusetts - but statistically it would be a bit surprising that a disease in cows would first show up there.
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        Yes, the institute of Virology in Wuhan did research on bats up to thousands of kilometers away. There are, after all, only two BSL-4 labs. However, there is a large population of bats right outside Wuhan, and you can find research by the WIV cataloguing different viruses found in the same province. For example : https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31009304/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31009304/ The key here is that the bats the virus (likely) came from are not actually thousands of miles from Wuhan, but only a few dozen. It's just that since the WIV is a huge institute they sometimes also do research in bats in other regions too, because they don't have such facilities.
randomdata 6y ago
> That’s why we have so few pandemics!! Depends on how you define pandemic. Just in my lifetime I've seen the rise of HIV, SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, H1N1, SARS-CoV-2, and perhaps others that I've forgotten, that meet the dictionary definition of pandemic. That is more than one pandemic per decade, on average, which seems like a lot. But you can also avoid calling them pandemics. HIV, for example, is officially a "worldwide epidemic". As per the dictionary definition of pandemic, I cannot find any difference between pandemic and worldwide epidemic, but I suppose to an epidemiologist there is a difference.
- thu2111 6y ago
  There used to be a difference in the WHO definitions but they changed the definition of pandemic at the time of swine flu, the new definition didn't require the virus to be deadly anymore.

by mjirv 6y ago

m0zg 6y ago

> But conditional on being in a pandemic the chance that the virus that arises to cause it is like SARS-CoV-2 is super high!! This will be misinterpreted by everyone who doesn't understand the Bayes rule (which is 99.999% of the population). What she's saying is just a fancy version of "this is the kind of a virus that would likely cause a pandemic", nothing more.

xster 6y ago

> certainly suggestive that it escaped from the lab, though that doesn’t mean it was necessarily “man made.” https://www.iesdouyin.com/share/video/6823589225980644623 https://www.iesdouyin.com/share/video/6823589225980644623 Dr Fauci said it better than I could, so I'll just quote him: "hahahaha"

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

bmitc 6y ago

> the chance of a virus like SARS-CoV-2 suddenly arising is fairly low I don't know if misleading is the right word, but this isn't the whole story and could in fact mislead people. What we should be taking from this breakout is that although potentially not that likely, they are becoming more and more likely. What's bothering me is all this focus on the wrong things. We need to already be preparing for the next spillover event for the next virus, but that isn't even close to being on the table, much less discussed or even mentioned. We shouldn't and can't be treating this as a singular event, but many are. I learned this from the below article: http://nautil.us/issue/83/intelligence/the-man-who-saw-the-pandemic-coming http://nautil.us/issue/83/intelligence/the-man-who-saw-the-p... >> Are spillover events more common now than 50 years ago? > Yes. EcoHealth Alliance, an NGO, and others, looked at all reported outbreaks since 1940. They came to a fairly solid conclusion that we’re looking at an elevation of spillover events two to three times more than what we saw 40 years earlier. That continues to increase, driven by the huge increase in the human population and our expansion into wildlife areas. The single biggest predictor of spillover events is land-use change—more land going to agriculture and more specifically to livestock production.

IAmEveryone 6y ago

To quote Feynman: "I just saw a car with the license plate <some random string with no meanimng>. The probability of that happening is far lower than being hit by lightning! As to the laboratory being close: it wasn't accidentally located in Wuhan. The city is the regional centre for a region that only recently expanded into somewhat pristine nature. With ongoing and constant encroachment of natural habitats, there is far more contact between wild species and humans than there is in Europe/North America, or even other Chinese regions.

polynomial 6y ago
Source for your rate of contact claim?
zaroth 6y ago
Feynman is making a joke which people who understand priors would get, but you’re using the punchline as if it means something. If Feynman had guessed the plate number before seeing it (say, written a research paper identify the exact number ahead of time) then something miraculous indeed just occurred.
- Izkata 6y ago
  Fun example time! Sylvia Browne's book End of Days predicts a pneumonia-like illness that spreads around the globe in 2020. Published in 2008. Additional details do not yet match what's happening, though.

iask 6y ago

Well, sadly, the damage is done. And it has certainly exposed our unpreparedness, broken/outdated protocols among agencies and exposed deep divisions in these United States. Just imagine if this is a test case, we’ve really exposed ourselves. I am quite certain our adversaries are watching and learning.

magicsmoke 6y ago
If this was a dress rehearsal for a WW2 repeat it certainly doesn't look good. In 1941 the US had enough societal fabric to conscript every fighting age man and send everyone else to the factories to make munitions for 4 years. Today, the US can't even get people to agree on using face masks and staying 6 ft away from each other for a few months. As a percentage of the population more Americans have died from covid than the Vietnam war. The wartime comparison is apt.
noelherrick 6y ago
No, sorry. The US was prepared, we just have an administration that failed us and an entire political party that cares more about short-term politics than protecting its citizens. We have to reform our system because it should not be possible that someone like Trump is head of the executive or Mitch McConnell is head of the Senate. Arguing counter factuals is hard, but I entirely believe we could have whipped this thing had we competent, good faith governance.
- Lendal 6y ago
  Yeah we've been tracking it and preparing for it since 1918. There's a whole industry built up over the years around preparing for this, but it still requires leadership involvement to put it into action. The leadership we have now believes in ideologies, conspiracy theories and blame. All they had to do was stand on the shoulders of science and let it work, as many previous administrations have done to prevent pandemics from becoming catastrophes.
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    USA and UK both reportedly took actions to stop funding pandemic response infrastructure, removing stockpiles and failing to fix known failures. The chances of both countries doing this just before a global pandemic seem similar to the chances that there's a virus lab in a Chinese mega-city that saw some of the first cases. So, it's proven Trump and Johnson are secretly Chinese operatives working as part of a covert group hellbent on destroying Capitalism with engineered viruses!!1one /s

throwaway326429 6y ago

> But conditional on being in a pandemic the chance that the virus that arises to cause it is like SARS-CoV-2 is super high!! This statement is a distraction from the main question. The question is: conditional on being in a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, what is the probability that the virus arose through purely natural processes, vs. the probability that it escaped from a lab. I am not equipped to assess the biological evidence, but I do know this: The virus came out of Wuhan, the location of a top safety level (BSL-4) lab that experiments on coronaviruses. It is China's first BSL-4 lab, and one of a small group of such labs worldwide. This alone suggests that the probability of a lab escape is not negligible and should be taken seriously. In fact, without considering additional evidence I would argue this puts the probability of a lab escape above 50%. But again, I am not familiar with nor am I equipped to assess the biological evidence. In addition, if the virus did escape from a lab, both the Chinese government and the bio scientific community are clearly and highly incentivized to keep this fact a secret. Therefore, when a member of one of these groups argues that this is not a lab escape, this serves as very weak evidence in favor of natural evolution. The incentive to keep such an outcome a secret is so strong, that I would argue we should discount such statements altogether and focus on the actual evidence.

fabbari 6y ago
There is something about this way of reasoning that seems faulty to me.The reason the Wuhan laboratory was studying coronaviruses in the first place is that there is a large reservoir of the virus in the area. In other terms: diamonds are hard to find, but where you find diamond mines you also find diamonds, ergo: diamond mines must create diamonds.
- throwaway326429 6y ago
  This is why I prefer thinking about the goal of this discussion as estimating probabilities, rather than as coming up with a logical argument that has a definite conclusion. I agree that the presence of a large virus reservoir in the area shifts the probability in favor of a natural process. I don't think it is enough to make the probability of a lab escape negligible. As a followup, I would ask: How many such reservoirs are there, how close are they to human population etc., and therefore what is the probability that the virus came out of this particular one? How many of these BSL-4 labs are located next to such reservoirs? etc. All with the goal of estimating how likely a lab escape was. I would like to emphasize that (1) it is important that we know the truth, because it will inform our preparation for future pandemics, and (2) there is sufficient evidence that warrants a serious look at the possibility of a lab escape. Instead of dismissing it as a "conspiracy theory", or leaving it all to the biologists, I suggest taking considering all the evidence and trying to estimate these probabilities.

jkhdigital 6y ago

> the chance that the virus that arises to cause it is like SARS-CoV-2 is super high This statement obscures and oversimplifies, which is unfortunately what scientists sometimes do when speaking to the public because they assume people won't understand otherwise. When she says "like SARS-CoV-2" she is not speaking about the physical structure of the virus, she is really just referring to general qualities that a virus would need to display in order to reach pandemic level: high infectivity, unusual disease progression for which proper treatment is poorly understood, frequent and unpredictable mutation, etc. What the researchers in this paper have done is identify the unusual components of SARS-CoV-2, i.e. the proteins and their physical structure, which give it this pandemic potential. And then they describe a sequence of research papers, published by virologists from the WIV, which demonstrate awareness of the characteristics of these exact features as well as a laboratory capability to produce chimeric viruses with these exact features. And the epicenter of the pandemic is a stone's throw away from the laboratory where those virologists work. If you're going to make a hand-wavy argument about real-world events using Bayesian inference, you need to be prepared to explain why certain evidence is independent of your prior. Or drop the argument.

mjirv 6y ago
It is worth clarifying that she was not responding to this paper specifically, just to general arguments of the type “this must be man made because it has so many features that make it well-suited to spread in humans.” The fact that researchers in Wuhan were studying (some of?) these features is stronger evidence when combined with the location. However, it also seems reasonable that features of viruses researchers study because of their likelihood to increase human transmission would show up in a naturally occurring virus with a lot of human transmission.
- dahfizz 6y ago
  > However, it also seems reasonable that features of viruses researchers study because of their likelihood to increase human transmission would show up in a naturally occurring virus with a lot of human transmission. You are letting language get in the way here. Researchers at Wuhan weren't studying "features" of viruses, they were studying what happens exactly when you insert X amino acid at Y location and how that can affect the structure of Z protein. And that exact, one in a billion, never before seen mutation happens to occur randomly right next door to them?

addicted 6y ago

This is the same stuff that causes conspiracy theories around airplane crashes. The conspiracists go “It must be a conspiracy because there are like these 6 redundant safety mechanisms and the odds of them all failing at the same time are extremely low”. But the answer is obvious. If the 6 redundant mechanisms hadn’t failed, the plane wouldn’t crash. So as long as the odds of failure of each redundant system is not 0%, every plane crash that ever happens will look the same, with multiple redundant items with extremely low likelihood’s of failing, failing together.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dahfizz 6y ago
This is not the same thing IMO. Imagine Russia announced last week they had a airplane hacking tool that could crash any 747 by using sonic waves to rattle some bolts loose making the wings fall off the plane. If tomorrow, 3 different 747s crash all because their wings fell off, would that be suspicious? You could say "well it was a plane crash, something had to go wrong". But things went wrong in a very specific and unique way that is directly linked to another nation. It's the same here. The researchers are showing incredibly specific modifications to protein structure and DNA. It's not just "oh wow, this virus is very virulent". It's "oh wow, this virus has a handful of never before seen mutations, all of which were being studied in Wuhan, where the virus began".
- muzika 6y ago
  Would it be any different if FIRST the 3 planes had crashed, and then a few weeks AFTER that, the hacking tool was announced?
Aeolun 6y ago
Is this often the case? I have the feeling that in most aircraft crashes it’s always a major structural failure, or pilot error/confusion. Not often do I hear that all 6 redundancies failed at the same time.

gmuslera 6y ago

The odds of having a particular order in a deck of cards is very low, but the cards have one of them anyway. I think you are looking at the odds from the wrong place. Could have been a pandemic with a simpler virus, too.

dboreham 6y ago

There are virus labs all over the place so this could be a birthday paradox. There's one here in rural Montana (the data we quote often about sars-cov-2 survival times on surfaces was generated there).

hobofan 6y ago
There are not that many BSL-4 labs worldwide, and especially in China (they only have 2).
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Unsurprisingly one of those is in a city of 19 million people next to a reservoir of coronaviruses that already caused epidemics.
  - bb2018 6y ago
    I've had some trouble understanding this claim though. From my understanding the bats that the virus most likely came from are thousands of miles away from Wuhan. This also is the area that the Wuhan researches went every year to collect samples. My understanding of Chinese geography is a bit weak - but it is a bit like if a cow disease broke out in Boston near a BS4 lab. There are certainly some cows in Boston a few blocks from the BS4 lab there. Sure - there are cows in Massachusetts - but statistically it would be a bit surprising that a disease in cows would first show up there.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      Yes, the institute of Virology in Wuhan did research on bats up to thousands of kilometers away. There are, after all, only two BSL-4 labs. However, there is a large population of bats right outside Wuhan, and you can find research by the WIV cataloguing different viruses found in the same province. For example : https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31009304/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31009304/ The key here is that the bats the virus (likely) came from are not actually thousands of miles from Wuhan, but only a few dozen. It's just that since the WIV is a huge institute they sometimes also do research in bats in other regions too, because they don't have such facilities.

randomdata 6y ago

> That’s why we have so few pandemics!! Depends on how you define pandemic. Just in my lifetime I've seen the rise of HIV, SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, H1N1, SARS-CoV-2, and perhaps others that I've forgotten, that meet the dictionary definition of pandemic. That is more than one pandemic per decade, on average, which seems like a lot. But you can also avoid calling them pandemics. HIV, for example, is officially a "worldwide epidemic". As per the dictionary definition of pandemic, I cannot find any difference between pandemic and worldwide epidemic, but I suppose to an epidemiologist there is a difference.

thu2111 6y ago
There used to be a difference in the WHO definitions but they changed the definition of pandemic at the time of swine flu, the new definition didn't require the virus to be deadly anymore.