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Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out

• newacct583 6y ago
  Almost no theories can be "ruled out" in this space. Viruses evolve in crazy and essentially unobservable ways. Nonetheless, we know there was a close relative documented in bats on the same continent within a comparable timeframe. The clearly obvious hypothesis is that animal transmission was the vector, for the simple reason that this is the way every single other pandemic, human or otherwise, has happened. There is nothing unique or notable about covid from the perspective of viral evolution. Period. So Occam says we go with the simplest theory. Attempts to wave away that fact have nothing to do with science about what was happening in Wuhan and everything to do with modern political opinions about a government 1000km away in Beijing.
  • gfodor 6y ago
    Occam's Razor doesn't really apply to this one, because each side has different priors on which theory is actually the "simplest." Given that, as far as I know, we don't have a single human case documented before those in Wuhan - something which a) should have been likely and b) China would be highly incentivized to root out since it would disprove the lab hypothesis, it implies patient zero was probably in Wuhan. If that's true, Occam could cut the other way, since the notion that case zero of a virus making a species transition would just so happen to occur in a city with a virology lab doing research on the same kind of viruses is a bit hard to believe.
    • learnstats2 6y ago
      > a) should have been likely Given that coronavirus would not be observable until there is a cluster of symptomatic cases in a city (and a doctor with relevant experience who can observe multiple cases - here 李文亮), I find it highly unlikely that we could observe earlier cases, if they spread less rapidly or outside a city - or even within another city with less institutional knowledge. > b) China would be highly incentivized to root out Even if so, this doesn't form part of any prior. China being incentivized to act in that situation, doesn't affect how likely or unlikely that situation was.
      • gfodor 6y ago
        The point is that even if we didn't observe such cases originally, given the incentives now, I would have expected China to investigate and surface evidence of such cases, even if circumstantial. So your second point is not a real point: the incentives don't determine the likelihood of it occurring, but they do dictate the likelihood of an investigation to determine if it did occur.
      • infogulch 6y ago
        > China being incentivized to act in that situation, doesn't affect how likely or unlikely that situation was. China being incentivized to find evidence supporting the CCP's desired image absolutely does affect how likely it would be for such evidence to surface if it exists. We see virtually no such evidence; we can assume that's not because China's lack of trying to find it; which should adjust our prior against such evidence existing at all. Yes?
        • learnstats2 6y ago
          My belief is simply that there is no such evidence. Reasonably convincing evidence, to me, would be: - genetic precursor virus particles which have died and no longer exist - they are extinct, or, - dated blood samples with immunological evidence of infection, sufficient that it isn’t just tampered/false positives. There’s no reason to expect this would have been collected. i.e. if you haven’t collected it by 2019, there is never going to be any evidence. This also answers your sibling commenter: it’s not in China’s interest to publicise any such search, when the odds of discovering anything (even if there were earlier infections) are vanishingly low.
        • infogulch 6y ago
          After thinking about this statement a bit, I must also admit the possibility that it did not originate in a lab yet finding evidence that it did not is still very difficult. That said, I still think that CCP's default strategy to cover up everything and shroud the truth is now hurting it more than if they were just honest and straightforward about what really happened.
    • jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
      Wuhan is a gigantic city, bigger than NYC. You'll be able to find an example of nearly anything in any category there. But it's also completely unsurprising they were researching the coronavirus category: the 2003 SARS outbreak was a coronavirus too, and obviously motivated an incredible amount of research across the world, but particularly in China.
      • gfodor 6y ago
        You're flipping the condition on the probability here.
        • jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
          Yes, quite deliberately.
    • space_fountain 6y ago
      Are they incentivized to do that? Remember they’re dealing not just with The west’s opinion, but also home opinion, where I don’t know that documenting that they should have found this weeks earlier would go over well. Not to mention I think they’re happy with the current local conspiracy theory that this was actually the US’s fault. It also seems likely that a big city especially one with a big lab would be more likely to be able to identify that the disease going around was new
      • gfodor 6y ago
        I'm not an expert on China but I would generally assume that the consequences and reputational damage of being seen as responsible by the rest of the world for COVID-19 would outstrip nearly any other possible consequences being mitigated against by not seeking to clear themselves.
        • redis_mlc 6y ago
          The exact opposite is true of totalitarian governments like the CCP. The CCP's only goal is to stay in power ("stability"), and admitting failure to their own people is at odds with that. The CCP doesn't care what the rest of the world thinks. You're a useful idiot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
    • newacct583 6y ago
      > Given that, as far as I know, we don't have a single human case documented before those in Wuhan - something which a) should have been likely Um... why? The virus has to jump species somewhere. If the first documented case was in Shanghai, you could make the same argument. I think what you're trying to say is that the jump had to have happened in Yunnan, because that's where that particular bat sample was found. But that's not what the data says at all. The Yunnan virus was a relative, not an ancestor. There are uncounted millions of wild coronavirus strains we don't see for every one we sequence. There is no reason at all to believe that some Wuhan-local bat, say, had a related strain that became the covid ancestor. Or some other species, etc... Again, that's the way viruses evolve. It's the way pandemics start. It's the way pandemics have always started. Demanding that this is somehow a crazy engineered virus dropped on us by a despotic foreign government is... how pandemics start in bad movies.
      • gfodor 6y ago
        Your argument is clearly being made in bad faith because you are creating a strawman in your final point. The claim is not that the virus was one that was engineered and deliberately dropped by a despotic government. Given that you don't have a basic understanding of the good faith hypotheses being promoted, I'll have to assume you are at best ignorant at worst a state actor. edit: lol at getting flagged for this.
        • dang 6y ago
          Your comment was rightly flagged because you broke the site guidelines and took the thread a big step further into flamewar hell. Please don't do that. Please do review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting to HN.
          • gfodor 6y ago
            pg knows as well as anyone else that if someone makes an attempt to paint you into alignment with a right-wing conspiracy theory, they're probably doing it with ill intent, especially if you made no such claim. If you want the HN guidelines to be consistent, they shouldn't demand people presume good faith when the tactics of cancel culture are wielded in threads to try to tag people with the label they are promoting right or left wing conspiracy theories, which can direct a mob in their direction if not strongly pushed back against.
    • marcosdumay 6y ago
      > we don't have a single human case documented before those in Wuhan The disease spread all over the world before people discovered the first cases, so it's not very surprising if previous cases on a less developed area than Wuhan were ignored.
      • gfodor 6y ago
        Well, sure, but my point is that now that people are suspecting it was the lab, we ought to expect China to be digging furiously for evidence of an earlier case. At least so far, I haven't heard of any such evidence.
        • ricksunny 6y ago
          Willful ignorance is the first posture I would expect from the CCP - that would be the specific avoidance of gathering evidence that would be embarrassing if found to exist. The second posture I would expect (if the first posture was not takwn) is that if they did seek and find evidence of particularly embarassing variety, they would actively stonewall access to awareness of that evidence and do everything they could to suppress that evidence. The statement, >we ought to expect China to be digging furiously for evidence of an earlier case is prima facie either incorrect or irrelevant to whether your ever becoming aware such evidence exists. China does not possess Western democratic institutions, (however flawed as even those might be), to achieve accountability. To wit, over here on the Western side of things, it’s going to be hard enough getting NIH to examine whether NIH funded this work in contravention of US gov mandates not to (see HHS Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight (P3CO) Framework, 2017).
    • stjohnswarts 6y ago
      b) but not highly incentivized to let anyone else know wha they found out unless it rules them out as the source.
    • markhahn 6y ago
      there's no reason to think that case0 originated in Wuhan, so the lab coincidence is pretty weak. Wuhan is a big city with lots of travelers. It would be nice to have a well-documented index case, but also quite unreasonable given what we know about asymptomatic spreading.
  • ab7675226 6y ago
    Occam's Razor indeed. The lab in Wuhan was studying bats and coronaviruses. Animal transmission is completely consistent with a lab leak, especially given that the virus in question is transmissible before symptoms. The wet market in Wuhan was not selling bats.
    • pvaldes 6y ago
      If there are insects, bats will come sooner or later, and tiny bat-bombs will follow.
    • jeduehr 6y ago
      Actually occam's razor would say that the many many many more instances of bat-human contact throughout the Chinese countryside are likely responsible, not a lab leak. Did you know that people use Bat Guano (literally bat shit) eyedrops to cure visual ailments in rural china? Among other risky practices. Bat guano is often handled with bare hands and used to fertilize fields without proper sanitary practices. The many tens of thousands of these events that happen everyday are a MUCH more likely scenario. I have a PhD in virology and wrote a post all about this on Reddit a while back: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did_not_come_from_the_wuhan_institute_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
      • thedrbrian 6y ago
        And despite the tens of thousands of people rubbing bat turds in their eyes the first cases come from people living in the middle of a massive city. I just find it incredibly suspicious that the massive city with a BSL4 lab doing research into bat viruses is where a bat virus first turns up.
        • newacct583 6y ago
          > And despite the tens of thousands of people rubbing bat turds in their eyes the first cases come from people living in the middle of a massive city. Uh... yeah. Because massive cities have, y'know, more people mixing together with more varied activies. It would be very surprising indeed if a new pandemic just happened to pop up in a tiny hamlet in rural Tibet. But cities are absolutely where we expect to see this happen.
  • martin_bech 6y ago
    But the distance inside China is the equivilant of a known bat virus in a remote location somewhere in Budapest, where only farmers live, and ground zero of the virus beeing downtown London streetfood market.. (were all the food and everything tested negativ..)
    • newacct583 6y ago
      You don't think bats exchange viruses between Budapest and London? That's nothing. Viruses in interacting populations are routinely continent wide. Let me flip this around: do you have even one example of a virus within a compatible species spectrum that does not expand across continent scales over the "few year" timeframe we're discussing?
    • Loughla 6y ago
      I don't understand what your argument is. Can you please expand?
  • nicoburns 6y ago
    We also know that a very closely related strain of the virus was being studied in the only BSL 4 lab in China, located less than a mile from the meat market where the virus supposedly originated. For me Occam's razor says unintentional lab leak.
  • T-A 6y ago
    > The clearly obvious hypothesis is that animal transmission was the vector Except nobody has been able to identify that animal. With SARS it was quickly determined to be civets, with MERS camels. With Covid, more than a year on, we still don't know. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/26/1021263/bat-covid-coronavirus-cause-origin-wuhan/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/26/1021263/bat-covi...
    • ufo 6y ago
      IIRC it took more than a year for people to conclude it was the civets.
      • T-A 6y ago
        https://science.sciencemag.org/content/302/5643/276 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/302/5643/276
  • ricksunny 6y ago
    >for the simple reason that this is the way every single other pandemic, human or otherwise, has happened prima facie false. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu#Virology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu#Virology “ it is widely believed that the virus was leaked to the public in a laboratory accident (may have been kept frozen in some laboratory beforehand).[4][5][10][11][12][13][17][19” And on top of that, the original SARS leaked from Chinese, Taiwanese, and Singapore labs a minimum of 4 times. So parent’s cited statement is false and does not apply.
• mylons 6y ago
  we should definitely shout down anyone who says it, though!
  • VBprogrammer 6y ago
    When someone's reasons for saying it are simply because it aligns with their own prejudices, shouting it down is reasonable.
    • arminiusreturns 6y ago
      And you presume to know peoples reasons for saying things? Perhaps you are the prejudiced one.
    • silicon2401 6y ago
      That's literally the ad hominem fallacy. We should investigate the claim on its own merits, not the merits of whoever is making the claim
      • VBprogrammer 6y ago
        Uh-huh, lets have a polite conversation sprinkled with some Latin. Mean while racists are empowered to attach Asian Americans in the street because they "created the virus".
        • mylons 6y ago
          let's just turn our brains off because there might be racism around
        • benmmurphy 6y ago
          The premise should be up for debate but we shouldn't accept the implication that because a lab in China leaked the virus it is moral to attack Chinese looking people in the street. You are effectively accepting the racist's reasoning if you ignore the implication and devote your energy to attacking their premise. I see this over and over again. Someone says A can't be true when A is a statement of fact because a group will make the argument A => B where B is something they find morally repugnant. When it comes to statements of fact you are much better arguing over A => B than hoping facts about the world conveniently line up with your moral conclusions.
• chenster 6y ago
  TL;DR Inconclusive evidence. The real message is "We don’t know."
  • fullshark 6y ago
    I'd add "and the CCP really doesn't want us to know"
• dhimes 6y ago
  The only issue here is that lab safety protocols may have to be tightened up in the lab responsible. Scientists mutate things in the lab all the time in order to have a tool for effective study. If this came from a lab, then it would be the same thing (not some sort of weapon, like the hysterical Right wants people to believe). Most believe that it didn't, but rather that it was in the human population a few months before we knew. But maybe not.
  • modzu 6y ago
    i'm curious what you would add to biosafety level 4 to tighten it up? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#Biosafety_level_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#Biosafety_leve...
    • ab7675226 6y ago
      It's not that you need to tighten up the rules... it's that you need to actually follow them. The Wuhan lab had a reputation for not following the rules for the CCP-Claimed Biosafety Level 4.
    • tastyfreeze 6y ago
      If there is a leak at a BSL 4 lab that implies that the lab is not strictly adhering to protocols not that the protocols are loose.
      • EMM_386 6y ago
        We warned about this lab. https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-state-department-cable-that-launched-claims-that-coronavirus-escaped-from-chinese-lab/2b80aef2-f728-4c36-8875-3bf6aae1d272/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-state-depart... Note part 6.
    • kaliali 6y ago
      Looks good on paper but what is actually happening in reality? How do I know they follow those procedures? How do I know they're not paying someone to give a checkmark for inspection? What would be the punishment if they were caught not following procedures? Would they publicly punished or would the embarrassment for the Chinese government be quietly swept under the rug?
• zthrowaway 6y ago
  We should really be considering this if we want to make sure something like this doesn't happen again. Unfortunately this theory coming out during the Trump era made people knee-jerk shoot it down for political reasons, and you can also say the CCP is very invested in making sure they don't have pie on their face if this ends up being what truly happened.
  • PicassoCTs 6y ago
    Also the CCPs investments into "political" careers in the WHO helped them alot there.
  • matthewdgreen 6y ago
    What is the actionable "fix", though? I mean: there are very real questions to be asked about gain-of-function research. There are other questions to be asked about standards for lab safety. But we should be asking these questions anyway, especially now that we've seen how devastating a real pandemic can be. Whatever happened in Wuhan it seems like the primary evidence is gone now. Trading in unverifiable theories about a lab leak is only useful insofar is that it kicks the ball forward on these issues. However the risk here is that these debates will make the issues controversial and politicized in ways that actually make safety improvements more difficult and not less.
    • xiphias2 6y ago
      One actionable fix is not putting virus labs in big cities (just like Nuclear and industrial plants), the other is stronger regulation of animal markets. Both make sense independent of where the virus originated from.
  • metalliqaz 6y ago
    The problem is evidence. What is the evidence? As far as I can tell, what we have is either circumstantial (for example, the location of the first detected cases) or outright hunches (the virus seems to be more adaptive than expected for normal corona viruses). Compare that to what we know: it's a SARS variant, in a place where SARS outbreaks have already occurred in the past, with DNA showing it came from pangolins, in a place where pangolins are caught, sold, and eaten by people.
• tinntin22 6y ago
  Ironic, if you said this during the Trump era you were a racist.
  • dang 6y ago
    Please don't take HN threads into flamewar. It's not what this site is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful. They include: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
• loveistheanswer 6y ago
  Judging by the comments in this thread, it seems a lot of people are still unaware that: 1. Gain of function research primarily uses samples collected from nature, and seeks to stimulate their evolution in as natural a way as possible to learn how viruses evolve in nature. If such viruses were to escape the lab, they would appear "natural" 2. It's not xenophobic for people from the US to suggest the possibility of a lab leak, because the US was itself funding gain of function research on novel coronaviruses in the Wuhan BSL4 lab 3. Lab leaks happen more often than most people realize[1] [1]https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/3/20/18260669/deadly-pathogens-escape-lab-smallpox-bird-flu https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/3/20/18260669/deadly...
  • newacct583 6y ago
    > 2. It's not xenophobic for people from the US to suggest the possibility of a lab leak Inherently? Of course not. But does xenophobia motivate a lot of this argument? It certainly seems to. Look at how quickly proponents of this nonsense jump from detached discussion about the possibilities to outraged condemnation of the PRC. Just read the discussion here in this thread. If you only wanted to discuss the lab and the virus and try to put relative likelihoods on the natural evolution vs. Andromeda Strain theories, that would be one thing. But... that doesn't seem to be all you want.
    • danielrpa 6y ago
      Just because the motivation for the argument is bad, it doesn't mean that the argument itself is bad. I think you agree by saying it's not "inherently" xenophobic. All we need to do to take xenophobia out of this discussion is to not be xenophobic ourselves. The xenophobes may talk to themselves. But let's make sure we are talking about this problem instead of falling for the "guilty by association fallacy".
      • newacct583 6y ago
        > Just because the motivation for the argument is bad, it doesn't mean that the argument itself is bad. Inherently? Of course not. But in practice it tends to act as a good prior for detecting bullshit. How many of these people would really be making the same argument in this way had the virus appeared in Bonn or Montreal? And again, to repeat: in this particular situation we have a very acceptable, very convincing, very obvious hypothesis for covid origins that simply does not require trafficking in badly-motivated argument. At the end of the day there's no strong evidence, we all agree on that. So I choose to believe something obvious that fits the data and patterns previous events, and others... choose to believe that a (literal!) conspiracy is afoot acting to cover up wrongdoing by an evil foreign nation. And that's bad.
• metalliqaz 6y ago
  it's not xenophobic, but xenophobic people really love to talk about it. that's the problem with the discourse. of course the irony is that it doesn't even matter. We already know China (1) tried to cover it up, screwing the rest of the world, and (2) has poor wet market sanitation practices that seem designed to cultivate these kinds of diseases. Those issues are already bad enough.
  • nicoburns 6y ago
    It does matter in the context of deciding whether we ought to fund gain of function research going forwards.
  • throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    >it's not xenophobic, but xenophobic people really love to talk about it. that's the problem with the discourse. People love to talk about stuff that supports their world view.
  • SubiculumCode 6y ago
    The opposition to the idea comes down to one thing 1)Donald Trump et al supported this hypothesis, and thus disagreeing with the hypothesis becomes reflexive for many.
    • fermienrico 6y ago
      Just shows how politics have divided us. No one seems to be thinking independently and that includes myself - I try but often the first reaction is otherwise. You can despise someone deeply, but if they are citing facts, reason, logic, etc - have no association, they stand on their own. Doesn't matter who uttered it.
  • abecedarius 6y ago
    > xenophobic people really love to talk about it Guilt by association + Overton Window enforcement. I guess you're pointing this out and not endorsing it?
• jjhawk 6y ago
  https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/opinion/2021/03/22/why-covid-lab-leak-theory-wuhan-shouldnt-dismissed-column/4765985001/ https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/opinion/2021/03/22/why-cov... Similar article which made the same case. This one provided a few more interesting stories about just how close we have come to potentially similar leaks in the past (and based in US labs).
• endisneigh 6y ago
  Every time this comes I ask - "so what?" So again, I ask - even if it's true, so what? It's impossible to conclusively prove, and even if proven what exactly is proven? That an accident occurred? OK, so what? The article attempts to answer this: > The vitriol also obscures a broader imperative, Relman says, which is that uncovering the virus’s origins is crucial to stopping the next pandemic. Threats from both lab accidents and natural spillovers are growing simultaneously as humans move steadily into wild places and new biosafety labs grow in number around the world. “This is why the origins question is so important,” Relman says. However the reality is from the perspective of the USA it doesn't even matter. Even if China was malicious and deliberately sent it off to us, it could've been easily stopped but we didn't do it. Unless we're going to go to war over this it seems like a pointless exercise as conclusive evidence will never emerge as it requires cooperation from China. We're worrying about whether it was created from labs in China, meanwhile we couldn't even prevent a massive superspreader event in Boston via the Biogen conference, filled with people who already has an awareness of the virus to begin with. Even now as I type this cases of the variant are increasing and the amount of people taking the vaccine is decreasing and silly accidents like the J&J fiasco are occurring. Not to say that we can't explore both things simultaneously, but it's pretty obvious that the return on investment will differ - one will do... what exactly? And another will prevent more cases.
  • ericb 6y ago
    On the one hand, yes, many who ask this seem to have something political in-mind, so on that score, I kind of agree that there's no "there" there. Aside from that, though, we can consider international treaties against gain of function research? International inspections? Have a debate on whether this type of research is allowed? Create improved international procedure standards for Biolab safety? I mean, it has killed more people than American killed in WW2. Maybe a root cause analysis and better procedures are justified? edit: corrected stat
    • engineer_22 6y ago
      You're off by an order of magnitude. Total deaths in WW2 estimated at approx 70 million. [1] Johns Hopkins estimates COVID-19 deaths are approaching 3 million. [2] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties [2] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
• engineer_22 6y ago
  In light of the disruption COVID-19 has caused, it's necessary to understand how it got started. If we are going to keep our intellectual honesty, nothing should be dismissed from consideration, including the lab hypothesis. In the middle of all that, geopolitics is getting in the way, and rightly so. China increasingly considers itself a peer nation to USA - so an unfettered foreign-led investigation is unlikely.
  • stjohnswarts 6y ago
    I'm starting to say look at the silver lining and see how incredibly unprepared we are for a biological attack/pandemic that has a much higher kill rate. Maybe there can be some policy changes made now given the experience.
• EMM_386 6y ago
  The 2018 US state department cables warning about this possibility can be read here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-state-department-cable-that-launched-claims-that-coronavirus-escaped-from-chinese-lab/2b80aef2-f728-4c36-8875-3bf6aae1d272/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-state-depart... Please note part (6) regarding WIV scientists studying human-disease causing SARS coronaviruses. Also note this report with the science to back it ("The genetic structure of SARS-CoV-2 does not rule out a laboratory origin"): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/bies.202000240 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/bies.2020002...
  • fsh 6y ago
    Could you cite where exactly the cable warns about this possibility? I could not find such a statement in the text.
  • jeduehr 6y ago
    VERY VERY importantly, the cables were not written by or authored by scientists. It was all Trump State Department-hired businessmen and diplomats who inspected the facility and wrote that cable. Why should we expect them to be good at determining what is a dangerous or risky lab facility? Notably, in the same cable, they also requested more funding be sent to the facility, so they could conduct more pandemic surveillance work (and possibly prevent outbreaks like this).
    • twobitshifter 6y ago
      This is just an ad hominem. You do not know who inspected the facility, their qualifications, and what research went into the cable.
      • jeduehr 6y ago
        Actually I do. I have A) direct relationships with the people who study viral biodefense at USAMRIID and serve on the government panels, and they were very surprised to hear about these cables. They didn't find the authors credible at all. One is an entrepreneur and the other a career diplomat. And for all those who don't have a PhD in the subject or know the people who know people, B) it's detailed closely in this washington post article who was there and what they wrote: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/state-department-releases-cable-that-launched-claims-that-coronavirus-escaped-from-chinese-lab/2020/07/17/63deae58-c861-11ea-a9d3-74640f25b953_story.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/national... https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...
• rndmize 6y ago
  I feel that for people paying attention to COVID news, this has always been the case; there's never been any kind of conclusive evidence on the origin of the virus (that I've read of). The article outlines three main possible origins - natural, accidental combination in lab, deliberate construction in lab. (There's a fourth option I've seen floating around - deliberate release of a constructed virus.) It seems that most of the scientists in the article are considering the second option; however, right-wing media has apparently in multiple instances sought to take their work to push the third, or even fourth option. It is thoroughly unsurprising to me that most scientific publications would take a stance against releasing studies or articles considering option two or three, as right-wing media and politicians were/are fishing for anything with a suitable scientific veneer they could throw out as evidence of someone to blame. (And its not hard to see why - telling your constituents they have to deal with job losses, family deaths and lockdowns because someone in China ate a bat leaves people without something to blame, and the politicians tend to be the closest relevant people.) Given the amount of anti-asian racism/crime/murder we've seen spiking in the last year, I think the publications' stances (and the more mainstream media) to lean heavily towards option one is understandable - no one wants to be the used as justification for hate crimes or political action a la the Iraq war buildup. Perhaps in another year or two things will have cooled down enough that stuff like this can be considered without collateral damage.
  • rossdavidh 6y ago
    Absolutely. Lots of issues that are just way too high-emotion right now for rational and objective discussion. One other reason it's way too hot to discuss right now: it would suggest that scientists were at least partly to blame for the pandemic. Even if you're not Chinese, you might not want to be discussing that idea if you were a scientist yourself.
    • nbardy 6y ago
      Because people are having emotional discussion doesn’t mean we should stop trying to have rational ones. In fact it’s the opposite we need to have the hard conversations as early as possible.
• COGlory 6y ago
  The evidence is circumstantial, but there has yet to be any evidence ruling it out. To be clear, the lab leak hypothesis is always possible. Things can always leak out of labs, let's not kid ourselves. Some things (going by memory here) that seem to support the hypothesis: 1) Major point of differentiation for this virus is that compared to it's closest known relatives, it has acquired a furin site (eukaryotic protein cleavage site) that enhances its virulence. 2) That furin site RNA contains a non-canonical amino acid codon 3) That non-canonical codon contains a restriction site that could easily be used to track, whether, say, your added furin site is surviving multiple cell passages, by performing a restriction digest and running the fragments on a cell. Like I said above, it's circumstantial, but this is all very normal. Both adding the furin site (how does coronavirus evolve into something more virulent?) and tracking it that way. Then all it takes is someone to get infected (EVERYONE working in biology has broken at least one lab safety rule in their life, even in BSL4) and either not be symptomatic and realize, or not say anything.
  • jeduehr 6y ago
    Furin cleavage sites very similar if not largely identical to this one have also been found in nature, and have been generated in nature in very short spans of time (on the order of a few decades, which is what is suspected to have happened with SARS-CoV-2). I describe the evidence in detail in this detailed longform post I wrote on reddit a few months back: Hi, I have a PhD in virology focused on emerging viruses, and a few months back I wrote a very lengthy and involved piece full of sources. And in there, I describe exactly how wrong your point 1 is. And how misguided your point 3 is. The post also won a "best of r/science 2020" award! You can find it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did_not_come_from_the_wuhan_institute_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did... See under "Addendum to Q2"
    • COGlory 6y ago
      I read through your post and it was incomplete and hand wavy, although that makes sense because it was written for Reddit. The bias was also obvious, and remarkably unscientific in how you approached the "problems" in a deterministic manner. You cherry picked examples (for instance, saying we can detect Cas9 mutations) that make no conclusive point (for example, there are a variety of ways to add a furin site to a genome that don't involve Cas9) but are indistinguishable as proof by the Reddit audience. The bottom line is, though, you are cherry picking arguments that lay people are more or less too unaware of their cherry picked status to argue with. As a virologist, who "engineers viruses", I also take some offense to this line: >The virus itself, to the eye of any virologist, is clearly not engineered. I also suspect that the viruses referenced in the featured article would object to that line as well.
• moosey 6y ago
  The most likely candidate for this virus, and most future viruses that produce pandemics, will be environmental destruction and animal agriculture. We know there are novel viruses out there, too many to count. Even if this started in a lab the most likely reason is that scientists need to study the viruses that we will be coming into contact with as we commit, as a species, to more environmental destruction. I'm really exhausted of watching scientists get blamed repeatedly for the failures of our economic and social systems to act responsibly. Sure, the lab hypothesis might have some weight, some possibility of being true. It's still a red herring, either a distraction from the real issues we face by accident or design, or both.
  • 99_00 6y ago
    The question of a lab leak is not incidental. The virus has caused massive suffering (and will continue to as we understand the fallout IMO). If it leaked from a lab and that was hidden from the world we have to wonder how much suffering could have been avoided if all the information was given freely as Chinese authorities knew it. There are some who suggest the virus was allowed to spread beyond China as a way to ensure China didn't fall behind competivley. Pure speculation, but we need to knowing if it came from a lab is a hugely important question.
  • tim333 6y ago
    >The most likely candidate for this virus, and most future viruses that produce pandemics, will be environmental destruction... I don't actually get that. How does destroying the environment cause this sort of virus?
  • stjohnswarts 6y ago
    Considering how much of the biosphere humans have destroyed I have my doubts about this theory I bet there are fewer novel viruses out there than any time in human history. I have a lot more fear of a crackpot despotic country like NK getting it's hands on something like a version of anthrax that is as virulent/transmissible as covid.
• hnbad 6y ago
  While interesting on a purely intellectual level, I think people unhealthily obsess over this. Epidemiologists have warned about the possibility of a pandemic for years. They've even been pretty clear about factors that manifested in SARS-CoV-2, like it having flu-like symptoms and originating in China. Whether the virus leaked from a lab, from a chicken or from some guy eating a bat, doesn't matter. This was going to happen one way or another and many countries, especially in the West, were incredibly arrogant thinking it wouldn't be a problem for them. Consider Vietnam: they followed the news very closely early on and already had procedures in place that would reduce the likelihood of transmission. While Europeans and Americans were only talking about some new disease in China, they started wearing masks and tracing contacts. When we only just started recommending people make masks at home, they already had the situation under control and were providing free meals to quarantined foreigners. We didn't take SARS-CoV-2 serious because we expected our "superior" hygiene, technology and healthcare systems to protect us even if authoritarian China had to "wall people in" to contain the spread. Surely we wouldn't need draconian uncivilized measures like lockdowns. In Germany we even maintained this arrogance when Italy had to send in military convoys to get rid of the bodybags -- of course they wouldn't be able to contain this, because everybody knows they're careless and flamboyant and disorganized. At several points, the US lost as many people to COVID per day as it lost to 9/11. Germany is already riding the third wave with no real plans in sight and a dysfunctional vaccine rollout. New mutations are arising and taking their toll in Western countries. This isn't on China, this is on us. So if you follow these stories out of pure curiosity, good on you. If you follow them because you desperately want someone to blame: stop. Blame your own country's government. This is on them. All they needed to do was take the experts seriously and not listen to industry lobby groups instead. Countries like Australia have understood this. Countries like Germany are too busy cutting backroom deals and playing party politics instead.
  • spaetzleesser 6y ago
    Agreed. Putting blame is not helpful at the moment or at best a sideshow. What counts now is how to deal with the situation. Knowing that China is to blame or not won’t save lives.
• marsven_422 6y ago
  Covid-19 is a biological weapon released by "the elite" in order to achieve there agenda.
• fasteddie31003 6y ago
  I've read that https://www.ecohealthalliance.org/ https://www.ecohealthalliance.org/ was funding coronavirus gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab prior to the pandemic. My question is why Eco Health Alliance wanted this research? What benefits come from artificially evolving a dangerous pathogen? Here's the article https://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/peter-daszaks-ecohealth-alliance-has-hidden-almost-40-million-in-pentagon-funding/ https://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/peter-daszaks-ec...
• rsync 6y ago
  Once again, I will ask for (what I believe is) an interesting piece of context ... How many labs like this one are there in the world ? Are there 20,000 of them ? Are there 7 ? Of the labs like this one in the world, how many of them are doing GoF research on coronaviruses ? 1200 of them ? 1 of them ? This won't be conclusive but given the reasonable heuristics that I work with, having a sense of these proportions would go a long way ...
  • phyalow 6y ago
    According to Wikipedia there are 56 BSL-4 labs globally, I cant find any good references on the amount of labs (BSL-3/BSL-4) doing GoF research on coronaviruses, but I cant imagine it is a significant amount. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#List_of_BSL-4_facilities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#List_of_BSL-4_... There is one fascinating article I came across published by Nature in 2017 which has all sorts of innuendo given the state of facts on the ground today. https://www.nature.com/news/inside-the-chinese-lab-poised-to-study-world-s-most-dangerous-pathogens-1.21487 https://www.nature.com/news/inside-the-chinese-lab-poised-to...
    • drran 6y ago
      How many of them had a major incident between September-December 2019?
      • phyalow 6y ago
        Probably only one. There is strong tertiary evidence that patient zero was a Wuhan Institute of Virology researcher named Huang YanLing 黃燕玲, this has all been scrubbed from public memory. The wayback archive links still hold up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU (links are at the bottom of the video description).
        • drran 6y ago
          Russia says no danger after blast in smallpox lab A gas cylinder exploded and prompted a fire in a Siberian research facility which houses samples of smallpox, SARS, Ebola and other potentially deadly viruses. Russian officials said there was no threat of contamination. https://www.dw.com/en/russia-says-no-danger-after-blast-in-smallpox-lab/a-50464719 https://www.dw.com/en/russia-says-no-danger-after-blast-in-s...
• lamontcg 6y ago
  > The virus does have an inexplicable feature: a so-called “furin cleavage site” in the spike protein that helps SARS-CoV-2 pry its way into human cells. While such sites are present in some coronaviruses, they haven’t been found in any of SARS-CoV-2’s closest known relatives. This is false. First of all it should be stated clearer that there has been parallel evolution across several branches of coronaviruses which have independently evolved a furin cleavage site (so there is evolutionary pressure and advantage for coronaviruses to follow this path): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1873506120304165 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612... And then the statement is just wrong. The related sarbecoviruses found in Thailand have similar furin cleavage sites: > The RacCS203 S gene is most similar to that of RmYN02 (Supplementary Fig. 3a). The two viruses shared part of the furin cleavage site unique to SARS-CoV-2 (Supplementary Fig. 3b) and have an almost identical RBD aa sequence with only two residue differences out of 204 aa residues https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21240-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21240-1
  • superkuh 6y ago
    Yes. And making it even more obvious the extremely well known (now) story of how the researcher that discovered the technique of stablizing the spike in it's pre-fusion conformation with proline substitutions (before being acted on by furin proteases) did so while working with MERS-CoV. It's not even obscure knowledge anymore that MERS had the same furin cleavage site. It's filtered out into public non-expert awareness.
  • COGlory 6y ago
    I have to nitpick. I don't believe there's evolutionary pressure to evolve this. Evolution is (going to piss some people off) almost entirely random. There may be purifying selection but that has an entirely different set of properties than the idea of Lamarckian evolution. Edit: Perhaps to clarify, what I'm trying to say is that evolution does not have foresight. And this is not my opinion, but merely that of Eugene Koonin, and I'm just repeating it.
    • abandonliberty 6y ago
• lamontcg 6y ago
  All of this can be explained by a real simple alternative hypothesis. Farmed animals like minks and racoon dogs were kept in cramped breeding conditions. Rhinopholous bats infected with sarbecoviruses are also present in Hubei. Those bats probably roosted above the animal pens and shit down on the animals below for years. The animals would periodically become infected. Eventually through mutation or recombination a strain became epidemic in the animals and evolved to be successful in a very closely related ACE2 receptor to humans. Then you had a large bioreactor which spread the virus doing "gain of function". Eventually it swapped backwards and forward from humans to those animals until it acquired the ability to spread epidemically in humans in late 2019. That process absolutely could have evolved a furin cleavage site, or it may have simply been present in the bat version of the virus (like the RacCS203 sample from Thai bats). Recombination with human HCoVs may have also happened in this process where the intermediate animal coronavirus infected a worker who also had a cold. When you read last year about the Danish mink farms with millions of mink being infected with SARS-CoV-2 you should realize that is a much better bioreactor to do natural "gain of function" experiments in than any BSL lab in the world has. Something like that, with a similar species, is likely how the virus hopped from bats to humans. This actually better explains all of the suspect features of SARS-CoV-2 than a BSL program does.
  • cicero 6y ago
    An alternative hypothesis does not rule out the other possibilities, even if it provides a better explanation. What matters is what actually happened, not what provides the neatest explanation.
    • lamontcg 6y ago
      The claim is being made that no other alternative hypothesis exists which can explain the features of the virus, so it must have come from a BSL lab. This is an alternative hypothesis which is simpler and less convoluted and does, in fact, completely undermine the "it can't be anything other than bioweapons research" argument. You're aiming your criticism at the wrong end of the argument.
• dandare 6y ago
  >... for scientists to voice suspicions about a possible lab leak,... especially when there was already a long history of viral disease outbreaks spilling over from nature. This is a really wired formulation whe we actually know, with absolute certainty, that every pandemic ever suffered was natural.
• tebuevd 6y ago
  no guys, the proximity of the Wuhan Lab to the Wuhan wet market is just a huuuge coinkidink ;)
  • dang 6y ago
    Please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• didibus 6y ago
  I'm going to jump to the next step... So what? Does it really matter where the virus emerged from? What changes would we make if it came from bats by nature's own doing? Or of it came from wet markets? Or if it leaked from a research lab?
  • ergocoder 6y ago
    Yes, you don't do a postmortem after an incident? It's just so strange that people are parading around saying "so what?". We don't want to learn from a mistake?
• avmich 6y ago
  > 2. It's not xenophobic for people from the US to suggest the possibility of a lab leak, because the US was itself funding gain of function research on novel coronaviruses in the Wuhan BSL4 lab It's not necessarily a Chinese lab where the leak originated from (hypothetical, of course). It could be a Russian lab - there are arguments for Novosibirsk Vector biology center as the origin of the leak.
  • ergocoder 6y ago
    Unfortunately, we probably will never know because we can't perform any credible investigation. China will never allow that.
• ncmncm 6y ago
  What nobody seems willing to say out loud to a reporter is that even talking at high levels about SARS-CoV-2 having possibly escaped from the lab would very probably sabotage Chinese cooperation in finding out more about its origins, whether it did or did not in fact did escape the lab. Now it appears that whatever damage could be done was, and China did block access to key information. I haven't seen anything to indicate it did come from the lab, or didn't. China's actions are consistent with either scenario. It would be very embarrassing to Chinese leadership if the lab-escape idea became popular, regardless of whether it was true, but especially if it were found to be true. China will be acting mainly to try to stop the idea gaining popularity, and be much less concerned with whether the international community actually learns its true origin. But if the Chinese leadership had confidence that it escaped the lab, my interpretation is they would probably do a lot more stone-walling than they are doing. But that doesn't mean it didn't. My brother flies freight in and out of Wuhan, never leaving the airport, and says border-patrol behavior at that airport is very strange, unlike at any other Chinese city. Before they are allowed to take off, the whole plane is carefully searched by soldiers in complete-isolation bunny suits, and passports collected on arrival are then carefully matched, one by one, to each crew member before departure. His interpretation is that China wants to be certain that nobody in Wuhan leaves China whom they would rather have stay. What that would mean, if correct, I cannot guess.
  • twobitshifter 6y ago
    They have been stone walling. The WHO was not allowed into the lab for a long period providing time for a cover up there was no agreement investigation until September 2020. They were then told to take the lab workers testimony at face value and not investigate the lab leak hypothesis any further. Doctors have escaped and claimed that it was lab engineered https://bgr.com/2020/09/15/coronavirus-whistleblower-wuhan-lab-origin-controversial-research-paper/ https://bgr.com/2020/09/15/coronavirus-whistleblower-wuhan-l...
    • ncmncm 6y ago
      Thank you for the link. The English text is very, very good, making it a pleasant read. I cannot judge its technical statements, and would welcome an expert evaluation. That RaTG13 and pangolin viruses were released only after the pandemic commenced was news to me. The Chinese are much better at stonewalling than you give them credit for. Allowing a team into the country was a major concession, and getting to actually meet (some) lab employees, sheesh! That amounts to a charm offensive, in context.
• rdxm 6y ago
  real-politik and nation state realities are too often discounted on this topic. was there a lab leak? yes, that's highly likely. What was the genesis of this event? also highly likely it was related to pushing the bio-weapon envelope. China is obviously pushing hard to catch-up, and doing so in every offensive dimension is highly likely given past behavior, to think otherwise is dangerously naive. What makes this crazy is the hubris(or discounting) of the numerous close calls for disaster during the cold war on this topic. The lack of real transparency on this with WHO exploration tells you all you need to know about whether this was a simple protocol eff-up or a blown military program..
• cletus 6y ago
  Look, this is simple: the lab leak theory shouldn't be discounted until the WHO or some independent body does their due diligence on, at an absolute minimum, these points: 1. Account for what coronaviruses Wuhan labs actually have. The Chinese authorities have been circumspect on this; and 2. Examine the virus database that was taken offline right before all this started. To be clear: I'm not insinuating that this is true or that China has covered something up here. I consider it more likely that no one simply knows (including in China) but for China there's little upside in being open about this so we can explore these avenues of inquiry. This "not wanting to know" isn't uniquely a China problem either. The WHO simply hasn't done the due diligence warranted to eliminate this theory. That's all.
  • alacombe 6y ago
    You can be sure that the Chinese have been very thorough at destroying any possible evidence of their potential incriminating evidence.
• rossdavidh 6y ago
  So, I agree, but I find myself thinking it doesn't matter now. What matters is: 1) could an accident at a lab lead to another pandemic in the future? yes, certainly 2) ok then, how are we going to prevent that? This seems much like what the world had to figure out after nuclear power became widespread; how do we keep this new technology from leading to catastrophic problems? It required international inspection, sanctions for nations who don't comply, and even big powers had to play along. Whether this pandemic started in a lab or not, we need a system to prevent the rapid proliferation of biologically advanced research, in more and more countries, from resulting in pandemics. So, the question of whether China had a lab leak that caused this one seems irrelevant at this point; what we need to do going forwards is the same regardless.
  • defen 6y ago
    > ok then, how are we going to prevent that? By not doing bioweapons or gain-of-function research? Wasn't the whole point of that research to prevent these sorts of pandemics? Even if COVID-19 wasn't from a lab leak...were those experiments actually helpful in being able to combat the pandemic? The answer seems to be no.
  • stjohnswarts 6y ago
    Obviously it should a learning experience but if we can possibly figure out where and when it started we can obviously put in measures for the future to stop it so I don't see how you can say it doesn't matter what the origin was.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• natch 6y ago
  This headline does not match the original, but, more importantly, the HN version is unintentionally misleading. It seems to be implying that these scientists who say this are outliers in their belief. Really they are just outliers (I believe) in their willingness to speak up about this matter. There are reasons others won’t speak up, ranging from access to grant money, to wanting to keep the door open for a China visa in the future, to not wanting to rock the boat with colleagues who are loyal to China. Unfortunately all this also gets mixed up, even if intentions are completely beyond reproach, with perceived racism and with possibly creating an uncomfortable environment for those who would rather not have the stuff talked about. It’s unfortunate. I don’t know the solution, but unfortunately a harsh “we must get to the bottom of all facts at all costs” approach is not cost free. The alternative let’s all sing Kumbaya approach also is not cost free. No conclusions or solutions here.. it’s a big complex problem. I would prefer to see more nuanced headlines though on HN...
• pumaontheprowl 6y ago
  Shouldn't be ruled out? The idea that some scientist accidentally infected themself with this virus while trying to study it is far more believable than a person contracting it because they ate raw bat from a wet market. It can't be a coincidence that the epicenter of this pandemic is less than a mile away from a lab dedicated to studying coronaviruses.
• babesh 6y ago
  Could they look for evidence of the virus from anyone who worked at the lab?
• ck2 6y ago
  Yeah I get people want to point fingers as useless as it will be. But just tell me how we are going to protect ourselves from someone like Putin or Kim Jong-un doing it on purpose the next time when half the population refuses to mask or get a vax and stop it. That's the far bigger problem. You'll never stop it happening a second time but you can prepare with policy.
• cambalache 6y ago
  If the virus were originally from the US and not China, 99% of the commenters here will be scoffing if a letter signed by MBAs,Zoologists, Industrial Engineers, Journalism students all from Russia and China were requesting total and full access to the US record, institution and land like this letter is requesting, especially after a panel of ACTUAL experts from WHO minimized the possibility of the lab-leak option. There are 2 rules in this world. One for white-dominated , rich, western countries and other for the rest. Racism, ethnocentrism and hypocrisy have been and will be human traits impossible to eliminate.
• followtheplot 6y ago
  I did a deep dive on the origin of SARS-CoV-2 last year and was surprised at how much information is readily available to anyone and yet so much of the story is still totally unknown to the vast majority of people. I'm talking about sources like major scientific journals and mainstream media here. It just takes some work to piece it all together. The story is actually really fascinating and almost seems like a fictional thriller novel. It actually gave me chills. This is all heavily cited with credible sources, here's the story: https://followtheplot.org/covid19 https://followtheplot.org/covid19
• kneel 6y ago
  It was in all likelihood a lab leak. The WIV in the same city as the intial breakout? This isn’t hard to piece together. I’m also convinced that the CCP will do everything in their power to deflect blame and claim a natural happenstance. The economic reparations that will be demanded from a faceless China would destroy their emergence.
• jrockway 6y ago
  Whatever actually happened, people have a pretty hard time with random chance. They need someone to blame, and a good reason as to why something bad can't happen to them. If the reason is "it just happened randomly", that's uncomfortable. There's nothing you can do to fix the problem, you just have to accept that every 100 years there's a 0.3% probability that you'll die from some random incurable disease. But if the reason is "some scientist was careless", then they can put that scientist in prison and society is saved from all future pandemics, and they can stop worrying. Of course, that won't actually fix the problem, but it doesn't need to, it just needs to make people feel better. Especially for claims like this, they're nearly impossible to conclusively disprove, so people will cling to it regardless of whether or not it's true. You'll see this come up again and again forever.
  • emouryto 6y ago
    It's possible that the maid dies randomly but if the Lord of the castle had some previous revealing interactions with her and the murder scene was scrubbed clean and no investigator was allowed in the castle for a whole year... then perhaps we can't rule out murder?
  • tim333 6y ago
    > There's nothing you can do to fix the problem... Unless it was a lab cock up in which case you can
• jokoon 6y ago
  I imagined a conspiracy theory (please build a lot of skepticism around this), that Trump asked for "covert ways" to damage china. The CIA knew about this lab, they worked to cause the leak, maybe it was not done properly, the CIA people were not informed on the science, and they did not really know it would infect the entire world. There is a similar plot in the TV show "The Americans". I don't believe this theory, but I'm guessing China could easily use this kind of narrative in disinformation campaigns. My only worry is diplomatic tensions with china. I guess everybody is a little anxious now and wants peace.
• 02020202 6y ago
  nah, it was the bat. how can anyone believe anything else? you must be crazy.
• p4coder 6y ago
  I think the following is much better paper on this topic. It discusses how the furin cleavage site occurs in lab and why ace2 binding could have emerged and why the virus was well adapted to ferrets right from the start. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7435492/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7435492/
• a0-prw 6y ago
  Maybe it leaked from a US lab? Blood samples from the Red Cross blood donor program show that it was already in 9 states in the US by mid December 2019. "It is not possible to determine whether the potential SARS-CoV-2 infections suggested by this study may have been community- or travel-associated. A previous survey of blood donors, conducted to help understand travel practices, determined that less than 3% of respondents reported travel outside of the U.S. within the 28 days prior to donation, and of those reporting travel, only 5% traveled to Asia." https://www.redcross.org/about-us/news-and-events/press-release/2020/study-suggests-possible-new-covid-19-timeline-in-the-us.html https://www.redcross.org/about-us/news-and-events/press-rele...
• 13daug 6y ago
  This show more African will be more poor if this won't stop and more crimes will be More special in my space Soweto