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Working out the initial cause of this Covid outbreak is far far far less important/actionable than working out what we should do differently when (not if) anoth

Working out the initial cause of this Covid outbreak is far far far less important/actionable than working out what we should do differently when (not if) another virus starts spreading. This concept should be familiar to those in tech already: https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/ https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/

maybelsyrup 5y ago
What if doing the first thing helps us do the second thing?
- deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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lukeholder 5y ago
You can do both. If a plane crashes, you find out the cause. During that evaluation, if you also find that the pilots response to the engine failure was also wrong, you fix that too.
- tolbish 5y ago
  There is a noticeable trend here of gatekeepers crying foul when others decide to talk about this. They try to shame you into silence, claiming that you are caring about the wrong thing, as if you cannot pay attention to more than one issue simultaneously. Whenever there is a trend of similar talking points on a hot topic it makes me wonder how much of that is influence from outside groups.
  - loopz 5y ago
    Speculation about it might be detrimental. So it seems like a bad tradeoff unless one can find evidence one way or the other, and what constructively to do about it first.
  - dang 5y ago
    Please don't resort to sinister explanations without evidence, when a topic is plainly divisive. It's an extremely tempting but low-quality discussion move that the site guidelines explicitly ask everyone here to refrain from: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html If there's specific reason to believe that comments here are somehow being manipulated, that's different and you should email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it. (That's in the site guidelines as well.) But the overwhelming majority of the time, there's zero suggestion of any such thing, other than people disagreeing, which is evidence of nothing but that the topic is divisive. I've posted hundreds if not thousands of explanations of this over many years at this point: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturf https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
civilized 5y ago
The link you posted still says we need to find out root causes. It just says some extra stuff about how to provide psychological safety so that people are more forthcoming and we are better able to get to the root causes. You will not find a sane engineer on the planet who says "we don't need to find the root cause, we just need to move ON and move FORWARD". Such nonsense is the domain of politicians.
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
Well I mean never letting Covid out (if that is the source) would have prevented 7-13 million extra deaths this year so it is worth thinking about how we don’t let another one out if it is possible. I disagree that it is less actionable. I am a former scientist. Proper handling of lab waste etc. is infinitely easier than having the whole world lock down, wear masks, and rapidly develop mRNA vaccines to try and put the genie back in the bottle.
- Godel_unicode 5y ago
  That's a false equivalency though; whether or not this was a lab accident, there will be future pandemics which aren't (like every single previous one in history).
  - dsyrk 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu Except another very recent one was also a lab accident. So, no, not every single previous one was, and 2 of last 3 will have been from labs.
    - XorNot 5y ago
      Except that virus was genomically identical to another virus in the 1950s. These thing's aren't being made in labs, they're being stored there but the actual reality is this: none of the countries being so interested in this have any ability to influence the country's these things happen in. So your effective response protocol may as well just blackbox the problem: "there is a new novel virus, how do we respond?" No one's going to be invading China to drop napalm on biological research facilities they've collectively decided without the CCP's involvement are "risky".
      - p1necone 5y ago
        Exactly. This is what I meant by "not actionable".
ahupp 5y ago
In software you would never do a postmortem without understanding the root cause of the incident. If this was caused by a lab leak, or even gain-of-function research, that seems like a pretty important detail.
- Godel_unicode 5y ago
  But that's not what you would start with. If you have an incident and discover that your response plan was hilariously inadequate, you would prioritize making more robust response plans because even if you can prevent that exact incident from happening again, there will be other disasters.
  - socceroos 5y ago
    Conversely, if you discover that the cause of the issue was inadequate controls during virus research then you should absolutely start with fixing those. Put it this way, if the cause of the worldwide pandemic was because it leaked from a lab then you should fix the lab.
    - loopz 5y ago
      Saying this as layman that warned for years about virus engineering, this is just a given. The mere potential should be enough. However, speculation without evidence and mitigation is bad.
  - creato 5y ago
    You're writing as if somehow general pandemic response has been deprioritized in favor investigating the lab leak theory, which is absurdly far from reality. This incident has cost millions of lives and possibly undone decades of progress on reducing poverty worldwide. It is worth pursuing multiple angles in parallel.
    - p1necone 5y ago
      Pandemic response in the USA was atrocious, and it's politically convenient for those who support the administration that was responsible to try to deflect blame however they can. So I'm very skeptical of the motives of people that keep posting stuff like this.
mc32 5y ago
Unless the release was due to gross negligence --like an outage is due to really bad decisions by someone. In those cases blamelessness is not productive and conducive to more mishaps,
- dsyrk 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu But it keeps happening and maybe labs working with such viruses need much more careful procedures or shouldn’t perform risky gain of function research for example.
1998v2 5y ago
Playing the opposite game with all recommendations from China and the WHO would have been a good start. I think responsibility and fear of discovery are at the core of how crucial information was suppressed and distorted leading to nonsensical actions like the SF rally for Chinatown in late February 2020. Part of this has resolved itself since every piece of information is no longer being evaluated on whether it helps or hurts Trump.
drewcoo 5y ago
> Working out the initial cause of the Covid outbreak is far far far less important/actionable . . . I think the saying "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" applies.
- geerlingguy 5y ago
  In this case more like 50 tons of cure.
recursivedoubts 5y ago
from a technical perspective, maybe (I don't agree with that, but I can see both side of the argument) from a legal/international relations perspective, absolutely not if this was a preventable bio-research accident rather than an act of God or Nature, there are huge ramifications for China's place in and relation to the world at this point I wouldn't be shocked if it was an accidental leak or an intentional leak by the Chinese, an intentional leak by the US or even an intentional leak by another country to provoke US/China tensions a forest of mirrors
cscurmudgeon 5y ago
Working out what we should do differently when (not if) another virus starts spreading is far far far less important than figuring out how to stop another such virus from spreading. Understanding the root cause is a logical way to do that.
Lazare 5y ago
My engineering org practices blameless postmortems too, and I am an extremely strong advocate of them, but a blameless postmortem is not the same thing as a postmortem that refuses to identify or address root causes. And here, there is some possibility that the current pandemic was the result of specific risks that we, collectively, took. Earlier in the pandemic I saw a focus on the risks of "wet markets" for zoonotic transmission; although that hasn't panned out so far as a theory for COVID-19, if wet markets present a significant risk of creating pandemics (note: if! I don't know they do), we should evaluate possible restrictions and regulations on them. More recently I've seen discussions of "gain of function" research on bat coronaviruses, and allegations that some dangerous research on coronaviruses was being carried out in BSL-2 laboratories. Regardless of whether COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak (or whether we ever prove it was), if some specific of research presents a significant risk of creating pandemics (again, if!), we should evaluate possible restrictions and regulations on them too. Pandemics are, I think, inevitable; it would be foolish to ignore trying to prepare for the next one. But the chance of a pandemic is very possibly not set in stone; it would be equally foolish to ignore trying to bring that risk down. And I categorically reject the argument we need to pick one or the other to focus on; I think we can focus on every step of the chain.
- AstralStorm 5y ago
  Funny thing, no matter what you do, there will be a pandemic similar to this one or worse. What you're doing is prolonging the time until regulations and checks failure. Potentially ignoring the fact that there will be unknown or covert actors ignoring all of these safeties. Instead, we would do much better to improve our tools for handling these issues by looking at successful and unsuccessful containment protocols, failed attempts to distribute a vaccine quickly enough etc.
  - Lazare 5y ago
    Look, there's a pretty plausible story (see, eg, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...) right now that we, as a society, have spent a significant amount of effort performing research that had a relatively high risk of accidentally creating and releasing a pandemic virus into the wild, and then it may well have done exactly that. It's not a wild idea that we should 1) figure out if this story is true and 2) if it is, stop doing it. > Potentially ignoring the fact that there will be unknown or covert actors ignoring all of these safeties. I don't mean this as negatively as it sounds, but I literally don't understand the argument you're making here. It feels like it's of the form: "Because <bad actor> might do <bad thing>, there's no point trying to encourage anyone from not doing <bad thing>." Is that...right? Because if so, do you also feel like police forces and laws against murder and assault are a distraction from medical research devoted to savings the lives of people wounded in violent crimes? I think it's reasonable to suggest that "setting houses on fire less often" or "banning setting other people's houses on fire" or "mandating more fire safe construction" are all complementary strategies to "getting better at extinguishing house fire".
zackees 5y ago
* The WHO released a report saying there was no evidence of human to human transmission and posted it on Twitter circa December 2019. * When the disease hit, Amazon removed masks from the market citing the threat of "price gauging". * Dr. Fauci said masks don't work. * Disease hits. * "Two weeks to flatten the curve" turned into a year. * NY and MI governors send recovering patients to NURSING HOMES, the MOST VULNARABLE DEMOGRAPHIC leading to a massacre. * Small businesses destroyed. * And then a network of leftist NGO leaders colluded to change the voting laws, then later bragged about it [in a Time Magazine Article](https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/) Looks like they already knew what to do to make the impact of COVID19 be as bad as possible and for the maximum political advantage.
katbyte 5y ago
I disagree. If it was indeed gain of function research in China that caused covid we should immediately stop doing that sort of research and ban it. There’s a reason it’s been controversial and many virologists have jobs on the line when it comes to its origins
- swader999 5y ago
  It was banned in the USA around 2013, then Fauci and Straszak shifted funding to continue it in Wuhan to get around the USA bans. Virologists signed on to the article promoted by Straszak claiming the wet market fantasy as Fauci and Straszak control much of the funding in virology.
  - titzer 5y ago
    > then Fauci and Straszak shifted funding to continue it in Wuhan A nested conspiracy theory is just what we need for some more political polarization in the USA. Score!
    - swader999 5y ago
      This information is publicly available and was mentioned in Wade's article. It wasn't against the law to fund it, there were loop holes in the rules that allowed circumvention with sign off from Fauci and likely another guy Collins from the NIH. So no need to dismiss this with the tired conspiracy claims.
    - cudgy 5y ago
      The convenient use of the word “conspiracy theory” usually indicates a lazy evaluation of the facts from what I’ve observed. The threat of “polarization” adds even more to the lack of rigor. Should we just ignore concepts and discussion if it is not generally agreed upon or upsets a group of people?
      - swader999 5y ago
        Unfortunately that's the way the game seems to be going. Have a huge interest in statistics and want to comment against the election results - better be very careful if you make unpopular assertions and need funding. Same thing appears here.It would be a very career limiting to make claims that are similar to the orange man's claims around the origin, the ability of otc medications like HCL or invermecithin to help early on decrease the severity.
fastball 5y ago
Is it? If this virus came about via GoF research in a lab, the solution for "next time" is: 1. Stop doing GoF research 2. Better lab containment processes
hungryforcodes 5y ago
People died. ALOT of people. I think an FAA crash investigation where they try to pinpoint EXACTLY where the problem or chain of problems were is more relevant here. Or the Challenger investigation. Don't miss that the entire gravity of this line of questioning is that if COVID19 did escape from the lab, our entire response to a lab leak would be different and save lives then a zoonotic emergence scenario.
polartx 5y ago
A serial arsonist was burning homes in a Midwest suburb. As regular home-burnings occurred, the residents became upset with the fire department. ‘Why was it taking so long to put the fires out?! Why can’t we have better fire hoses, or faster fire engines?! Maybe the town tax dollars should pay for private enterprises to go around and moisten homes, making them less flammable?’ Another group of residents were trying to convince their neighbors that they should be trying to catch the culprit. They felt they had some pretty compelling clues as to who the arsonist was. But they were shouted down, ‘No, no, no.’, they hand waved. ‘Working out who started the fires is far far far less important/actionable than working out what we should do when (not if) another [fire] starts spreading’ Oh the absurdity.
kelnos 5y ago
In my experience, blameless postmortems can be really useful for the process of getting to the bottom of things and creating a plan of action, but can also enable people who are reckless or incompetent, and make it difficult to ensure that the people who really need to learn something from their failures have actually learned something. As applied to this situation, it doesn't really matter. The Chinese government has a vested interest in any investigation being labeled inconclusive. Whether it was a lab leak or a result of unhealthy agricultural practices, China doesn't want egg on its face. They'll do everything in their power (which is a lot) to avoid having the finger definitively pointed at them.

maybelsyrup 5y ago

What if doing the first thing helps us do the second thing?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

lukeholder 5y ago

You can do both. If a plane crashes, you find out the cause. During that evaluation, if you also find that the pilots response to the engine failure was also wrong, you fix that too.

tolbish 5y ago
There is a noticeable trend here of gatekeepers crying foul when others decide to talk about this. They try to shame you into silence, claiming that you are caring about the wrong thing, as if you cannot pay attention to more than one issue simultaneously. Whenever there is a trend of similar talking points on a hot topic it makes me wonder how much of that is influence from outside groups.
- loopz 5y ago
  Speculation about it might be detrimental. So it seems like a bad tradeoff unless one can find evidence one way or the other, and what constructively to do about it first.
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't resort to sinister explanations without evidence, when a topic is plainly divisive. It's an extremely tempting but low-quality discussion move that the site guidelines explicitly ask everyone here to refrain from: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html If there's specific reason to believe that comments here are somehow being manipulated, that's different and you should email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it. (That's in the site guidelines as well.) But the overwhelming majority of the time, there's zero suggestion of any such thing, other than people disagreeing, which is evidence of nothing but that the topic is divisive. I've posted hundreds if not thousands of explanations of this over many years at this point: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturf https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

civilized 5y ago

The link you posted still says we need to find out root causes. It just says some extra stuff about how to provide psychological safety so that people are more forthcoming and we are better able to get to the root causes. You will not find a sane engineer on the planet who says "we don't need to find the root cause, we just need to move ON and move FORWARD". Such nonsense is the domain of politicians.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

Well I mean never letting Covid out (if that is the source) would have prevented 7-13 million extra deaths this year so it is worth thinking about how we don’t let another one out if it is possible. I disagree that it is less actionable. I am a former scientist. Proper handling of lab waste etc. is infinitely easier than having the whole world lock down, wear masks, and rapidly develop mRNA vaccines to try and put the genie back in the bottle.

Godel_unicode 5y ago
That's a false equivalency though; whether or not this was a lab accident, there will be future pandemics which aren't (like every single previous one in history).
- dsyrk 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu Except another very recent one was also a lab accident. So, no, not every single previous one was, and 2 of last 3 will have been from labs.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    Except that virus was genomically identical to another virus in the 1950s. These thing's aren't being made in labs, they're being stored there but the actual reality is this: none of the countries being so interested in this have any ability to influence the country's these things happen in. So your effective response protocol may as well just blackbox the problem: "there is a new novel virus, how do we respond?" No one's going to be invading China to drop napalm on biological research facilities they've collectively decided without the CCP's involvement are "risky".
    - p1necone 5y ago
      Exactly. This is what I meant by "not actionable".

ahupp 5y ago

In software you would never do a postmortem without understanding the root cause of the incident. If this was caused by a lab leak, or even gain-of-function research, that seems like a pretty important detail.

Godel_unicode 5y ago
But that's not what you would start with. If you have an incident and discover that your response plan was hilariously inadequate, you would prioritize making more robust response plans because even if you can prevent that exact incident from happening again, there will be other disasters.
- socceroos 5y ago
  Conversely, if you discover that the cause of the issue was inadequate controls during virus research then you should absolutely start with fixing those. Put it this way, if the cause of the worldwide pandemic was because it leaked from a lab then you should fix the lab.
  - loopz 5y ago
    Saying this as layman that warned for years about virus engineering, this is just a given. The mere potential should be enough. However, speculation without evidence and mitigation is bad.
- creato 5y ago
  You're writing as if somehow general pandemic response has been deprioritized in favor investigating the lab leak theory, which is absurdly far from reality. This incident has cost millions of lives and possibly undone decades of progress on reducing poverty worldwide. It is worth pursuing multiple angles in parallel.
  - p1necone 5y ago
    Pandemic response in the USA was atrocious, and it's politically convenient for those who support the administration that was responsible to try to deflect blame however they can. So I'm very skeptical of the motives of people that keep posting stuff like this.

mc32 5y ago

Unless the release was due to gross negligence --like an outage is due to really bad decisions by someone. In those cases blamelessness is not productive and conducive to more mishaps,

dsyrk 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu But it keeps happening and maybe labs working with such viruses need much more careful procedures or shouldn’t perform risky gain of function research for example.

1998v2 5y ago

Playing the opposite game with all recommendations from China and the WHO would have been a good start. I think responsibility and fear of discovery are at the core of how crucial information was suppressed and distorted leading to nonsensical actions like the SF rally for Chinatown in late February 2020. Part of this has resolved itself since every piece of information is no longer being evaluated on whether it helps or hurts Trump.

drewcoo 5y ago

> Working out the initial cause of the Covid outbreak is far far far less important/actionable . . . I think the saying "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" applies.

geerlingguy 5y ago
In this case more like 50 tons of cure.

recursivedoubts 5y ago

from a technical perspective, maybe (I don't agree with that, but I can see both side of the argument) from a legal/international relations perspective, absolutely not if this was a preventable bio-research accident rather than an act of God or Nature, there are huge ramifications for China's place in and relation to the world at this point I wouldn't be shocked if it was an accidental leak or an intentional leak by the Chinese, an intentional leak by the US or even an intentional leak by another country to provoke US/China tensions a forest of mirrors

cscurmudgeon 5y ago

Working out what we should do differently when (not if) another virus starts spreading is far far far less important than figuring out how to stop another such virus from spreading. Understanding the root cause is a logical way to do that.

Lazare 5y ago

My engineering org practices blameless postmortems too, and I am an extremely strong advocate of them, but a blameless postmortem is not the same thing as a postmortem that refuses to identify or address root causes. And here, there is some possibility that the current pandemic was the result of specific risks that we, collectively, took. Earlier in the pandemic I saw a focus on the risks of "wet markets" for zoonotic transmission; although that hasn't panned out so far as a theory for COVID-19, if wet markets present a significant risk of creating pandemics (note: if! I don't know they do), we should evaluate possible restrictions and regulations on them. More recently I've seen discussions of "gain of function" research on bat coronaviruses, and allegations that some dangerous research on coronaviruses was being carried out in BSL-2 laboratories. Regardless of whether COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak (or whether we ever prove it was), if some specific of research presents a significant risk of creating pandemics (again, if!), we should evaluate possible restrictions and regulations on them too. Pandemics are, I think, inevitable; it would be foolish to ignore trying to prepare for the next one. But the chance of a pandemic is very possibly not set in stone; it would be equally foolish to ignore trying to bring that risk down. And I categorically reject the argument we need to pick one or the other to focus on; I think we can focus on every step of the chain.

AstralStorm 5y ago
Funny thing, no matter what you do, there will be a pandemic similar to this one or worse. What you're doing is prolonging the time until regulations and checks failure. Potentially ignoring the fact that there will be unknown or covert actors ignoring all of these safeties. Instead, we would do much better to improve our tools for handling these issues by looking at successful and unsuccessful containment protocols, failed attempts to distribute a vaccine quickly enough etc.
- Lazare 5y ago
  Look, there's a pretty plausible story (see, eg, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...) right now that we, as a society, have spent a significant amount of effort performing research that had a relatively high risk of accidentally creating and releasing a pandemic virus into the wild, and then it may well have done exactly that. It's not a wild idea that we should 1) figure out if this story is true and 2) if it is, stop doing it. > Potentially ignoring the fact that there will be unknown or covert actors ignoring all of these safeties. I don't mean this as negatively as it sounds, but I literally don't understand the argument you're making here. It feels like it's of the form: "Because <bad actor> might do <bad thing>, there's no point trying to encourage anyone from not doing <bad thing>." Is that...right? Because if so, do you also feel like police forces and laws against murder and assault are a distraction from medical research devoted to savings the lives of people wounded in violent crimes? I think it's reasonable to suggest that "setting houses on fire less often" or "banning setting other people's houses on fire" or "mandating more fire safe construction" are all complementary strategies to "getting better at extinguishing house fire".

zackees 5y ago

* The WHO released a report saying there was no evidence of human to human transmission and posted it on Twitter circa December 2019. * When the disease hit, Amazon removed masks from the market citing the threat of "price gauging". * Dr. Fauci said masks don't work. * Disease hits. * "Two weeks to flatten the curve" turned into a year. * NY and MI governors send recovering patients to NURSING HOMES, the MOST VULNARABLE DEMOGRAPHIC leading to a massacre. * Small businesses destroyed. * And then a network of leftist NGO leaders colluded to change the voting laws, then later bragged about it [in a Time Magazine Article](https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/) Looks like they already knew what to do to make the impact of COVID19 be as bad as possible and for the maximum political advantage.

katbyte 5y ago

I disagree. If it was indeed gain of function research in China that caused covid we should immediately stop doing that sort of research and ban it. There’s a reason it’s been controversial and many virologists have jobs on the line when it comes to its origins

swader999 5y ago
It was banned in the USA around 2013, then Fauci and Straszak shifted funding to continue it in Wuhan to get around the USA bans. Virologists signed on to the article promoted by Straszak claiming the wet market fantasy as Fauci and Straszak control much of the funding in virology.
- titzer 5y ago
  > then Fauci and Straszak shifted funding to continue it in Wuhan A nested conspiracy theory is just what we need for some more political polarization in the USA. Score!
  - swader999 5y ago
    This information is publicly available and was mentioned in Wade's article. It wasn't against the law to fund it, there were loop holes in the rules that allowed circumvention with sign off from Fauci and likely another guy Collins from the NIH. So no need to dismiss this with the tired conspiracy claims.
  - cudgy 5y ago
    The convenient use of the word “conspiracy theory” usually indicates a lazy evaluation of the facts from what I’ve observed. The threat of “polarization” adds even more to the lack of rigor. Should we just ignore concepts and discussion if it is not generally agreed upon or upsets a group of people?
    - swader999 5y ago
      Unfortunately that's the way the game seems to be going. Have a huge interest in statistics and want to comment against the election results - better be very careful if you make unpopular assertions and need funding. Same thing appears here.It would be a very career limiting to make claims that are similar to the orange man's claims around the origin, the ability of otc medications like HCL or invermecithin to help early on decrease the severity.

fastball 5y ago

Is it? If this virus came about via GoF research in a lab, the solution for "next time" is: 1. Stop doing GoF research 2. Better lab containment processes

hungryforcodes 5y ago

People died. ALOT of people. I think an FAA crash investigation where they try to pinpoint EXACTLY where the problem or chain of problems were is more relevant here. Or the Challenger investigation. Don't miss that the entire gravity of this line of questioning is that if COVID19 did escape from the lab, our entire response to a lab leak would be different and save lives then a zoonotic emergence scenario.

polartx 5y ago

A serial arsonist was burning homes in a Midwest suburb. As regular home-burnings occurred, the residents became upset with the fire department. ‘Why was it taking so long to put the fires out?! Why can’t we have better fire hoses, or faster fire engines?! Maybe the town tax dollars should pay for private enterprises to go around and moisten homes, making them less flammable?’ Another group of residents were trying to convince their neighbors that they should be trying to catch the culprit. They felt they had some pretty compelling clues as to who the arsonist was. But they were shouted down, ‘No, no, no.’, they hand waved. ‘Working out who started the fires is far far far less important/actionable than working out what we should do when (not if) another [fire] starts spreading’ Oh the absurdity.

kelnos 5y ago

In my experience, blameless postmortems can be really useful for the process of getting to the bottom of things and creating a plan of action, but can also enable people who are reckless or incompetent, and make it difficult to ensure that the people who really need to learn something from their failures have actually learned something. As applied to this situation, it doesn't really matter. The Chinese government has a vested interest in any investigation being labeled inconclusive. Whether it was a lab leak or a result of unhealthy agricultural practices, China doesn't want egg on its face. They'll do everything in their power (which is a lot) to avoid having the finger definitively pointed at them.