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So the best guess is that it came from wild bats, and there was a lab right next to the initial outbreak site that was studying wild bats. That could just be a

So the best guess is that it came from wild bats, and there was a lab right next to the initial outbreak site that was studying wild bats. That could just be a coincidence, but it's a pretty remarkable coincidence and at the very least deserves further investigation. It could have been just an innocent mistake. A researcher got the disease while collecting bats out in the wild, but the lab never got a sample of the disease. The researcher was asymptomatic and unknowingly spread it to another person while stopping by the local market on their way home. So as far as anybody can tell, it came from the marketplace. I don't know what really happened, but I think I'm being more reasonable that most people about this. There's three other major lines of thinking, all politically motivated and all wrong in my opinion. #1: Many of the Western "liberals", especially the media, dismissed any kind of "lab-leak theory" as right wing conspiracies for most of 2020. I honestly think just because Trump and the right were promoting it, the "liberals" were against it. #2: The Western conservatives and Trump filled in all the blanks in the "lab-leak theories" with their own personal agendas. This turned sane and objective lab-leak theories into conspiracy theories. What the other lab in Wuhan was doing is interesting, but not necessarily connected. #3: The Chinese government considers any lab-leak theories as anti-Chinese propaganda, and aggressively launches it's own counter-propaganda. In my opinion, the Chinese government doesn't want to know the truth, and the biggest and most racist anti-Chinese organization of them all is the Chinese government itself, based upon what's currently happening in HK and to the Uighurs, among other human rights issues. I'm by no means against China, their government is just as hypocritical as the US, and both get in the way of any kind of truly objective and scientific approach to these issues. Seems like there's so much "noise", so much cognitive dissonance and emotional charge, that we're incapable of discussing these things sanely.

j_walter 5y ago
I think the fact that there are only two labs in China that study Coronaviruses...and the outbreak location is a few hundred yards from where one of the labs is...is enough of a coincidence that it should be THE theory that it somehow (leak of some sort) until proven otherwise.
- bmn__ 5y ago
  I think you are confusing WIV and WCDC. Check whether in that light the theory still makes sense.
slownews45 5y ago
If this really did jump from bats, they should be able to find this IN bats. Instead we can't seem to find that side of things. Instead the virus seems better fit to the mouse / ACE2 receptor stuff going on in the lab (with a big jump in infection rate) vs a gradual build from something evolving to work in humans.
lamontcg 5y ago
> That could just be a coincidence, but it's a pretty remarkable coincidence Not really. It was always likely to be found in a major population center where people cluster tightly, where the r0 would be higher, where superspreading events would hit more people, and where there would be more educated hospital staff that would notice something going on. Wuhan is the largest city in central China. It is also about as close to Yunnan where the bats are, as Guangdong is (where the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak happened). If we understood what kind of intermediate animals might be involved in the zoonotic transfer and what their movement was around China, I strongly suspect that the chances that it was observed in Wuhan are something closer to 1-in-12 than 1-in-1000. And this is the second round, the first roll of the dice we had was with SARS-CoV-1 where we rolled a different number and it hit Guangdong.
- calibas 5y ago
  Wuhan is 3,200 square miles, and it didn't just happen anywhere in Wuhan. The initial outbreak site was within walking distance of a laboratory that was studying that specific type of virus. Of all the different heavily-populated places the disease could have started, it happened right next to a lab studying coronaviruses. That's no "1-in-12" chance and even "1-in-1000" seems kinda low. The "lab-leak theory" is just as reasonable as the "we don't know where it came from but it wasn't the nearby lab theory".

j_walter 5y ago

I think the fact that there are only two labs in China that study Coronaviruses...and the outbreak location is a few hundred yards from where one of the labs is...is enough of a coincidence that it should be THE theory that it somehow (leak of some sort) until proven otherwise.

bmn__ 5y ago
I think you are confusing WIV and WCDC. Check whether in that light the theory still makes sense.

slownews45 5y ago

If this really did jump from bats, they should be able to find this IN bats. Instead we can't seem to find that side of things. Instead the virus seems better fit to the mouse / ACE2 receptor stuff going on in the lab (with a big jump in infection rate) vs a gradual build from something evolving to work in humans.

lamontcg 5y ago

> That could just be a coincidence, but it's a pretty remarkable coincidence Not really. It was always likely to be found in a major population center where people cluster tightly, where the r0 would be higher, where superspreading events would hit more people, and where there would be more educated hospital staff that would notice something going on. Wuhan is the largest city in central China. It is also about as close to Yunnan where the bats are, as Guangdong is (where the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak happened). If we understood what kind of intermediate animals might be involved in the zoonotic transfer and what their movement was around China, I strongly suspect that the chances that it was observed in Wuhan are something closer to 1-in-12 than 1-in-1000. And this is the second round, the first roll of the dice we had was with SARS-CoV-1 where we rolled a different number and it hit Guangdong.

calibas 5y ago
Wuhan is 3,200 square miles, and it didn't just happen anywhere in Wuhan. The initial outbreak site was within walking distance of a laboratory that was studying that specific type of virus. Of all the different heavily-populated places the disease could have started, it happened right next to a lab studying coronaviruses. That's no "1-in-12" chance and even "1-in-1000" seems kinda low. The "lab-leak theory" is just as reasonable as the "we don't know where it came from but it wasn't the nearby lab theory".