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The zoonotic spillover doesn't seem to address geography. Why would the virus first appear in a city near a virology institute instead of out in the country nea

by adolph 5y ago

The zoonotic spillover doesn't seem to address geography. Why would the virus first appear in a city near a virology institute instead of out in the country near bat habitats? The speculation from scientists like Dr. Daszak is that someone ate an infected live bat from "southern China." I've seen the studies about air flows in restaurants and buffets and none seem to indicate that Covid is food borne. So we have someone in the wet market about to bite into some delicious live bat and they give it a big sniff right as the bat expels some of its last little virus contaminated breaths. "Squee, squee" says the bat. "Hmm-mm finger licking good" says the world's unluckiest connoisseur of things that flutter in the night. Alternatively, someone was careless in a lab studying the same family of bats and viruses. In the sense that one need not attribute to malice that which is explained by incompetence, the leaked virus need not have been some "biowarfare" effort, maybe just something a bit entrepreneurial or a side experiment to see if something could work. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/who-report-says-covid-originated-in-bats-but-critics-claim-the-study-was-biased https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/who-report-says-covid-orig...

cratermoon 5y ago
> Why would the virus first appear in a city near a virology institute instead of out in the country near bat habitats? Have you considered the possibility that it first appeared in the vicinity of a lab that experiments on similar viruses is because if it had appeared elsewhere, there would have been no sufficiently-equipped lab to isolate it? This is the streetlight effect: you find things where you (are able to) look for them. In other words, it couldn't have appeared somewhere far from a properly-equipped lab, because there would be no properly-equipped lab to detect it.
- makomk 5y ago
  Pretty sure this doesn't make sense at all. If I remember rightly, the way Covid-19 was originally identified was that two or three different private sector labs which don't normally work with this kind of virus at all managed to sequence it well enough to identify what it was - it had nothing to do with the virology institute. Not only that, the fact that they weren't officially meant to be handling this kind of virus was used to shut them up and get them to destroy the virus sequences they'd found.

by adolph 5y ago

cratermoon 5y ago

> Why would the virus first appear in a city near a virology institute instead of out in the country near bat habitats? Have you considered the possibility that it first appeared in the vicinity of a lab that experiments on similar viruses is because if it had appeared elsewhere, there would have been no sufficiently-equipped lab to isolate it? This is the streetlight effect: you find things where you (are able to) look for them. In other words, it couldn't have appeared somewhere far from a properly-equipped lab, because there would be no properly-equipped lab to detect it.

makomk 5y ago
Pretty sure this doesn't make sense at all. If I remember rightly, the way Covid-19 was originally identified was that two or three different private sector labs which don't normally work with this kind of virus at all managed to sequence it well enough to identify what it was - it had nothing to do with the virology institute. Not only that, the fact that they weren't officially meant to be handling this kind of virus was used to shut them up and get them to destroy the virus sequences they'd found.