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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 relativ

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.

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.