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Yes, the jumping of viruses from animals to humans due to keeping them in close proximity is so unlikely that it's happened hundreds of times before (e.g. SARS,
by timy2shoes 5y ago
Yes, the jumping of viruses from animals to humans due to keeping them in close proximity is so unlikely that it's happened hundreds of times before (e.g. SARS, MERS, Spanish flu, bubonic plague).
- ChemSpider 5y agoThe bat lady herself says that these type of bats are not in or near Wuhan: “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-wo...
- lamontcg 5y agoThe bat viruses most closely related to SARS-CoV-1 were found 700+ miles away from Guangdong where the first SARS-CoV-1 outbreak was. There's never been any explanation of how that happened, but there's no distraction of a BSL4 lab in Guangdong so there's no lab leak theory. But that is proof that a virus in bats can jump to humans 700+ miles away.
- Mizza 5y agoIf you're going down that route, you might also want to consider that there have been two other incidents of SARS escaping from labs in China: https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-spotlight-20040427-03 https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-...
- timy2shoes 5y agoI'm not excluding the lab hypothesis, I'm just pointing our that the natural hypothesis is also valid. Honestly, I don't think we're ever gonna figure out definitively which one it was (I don't think there's a 3rd competing theory). Even if it was a lab leak, I suspect that the evidence for that is gone.