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IMO, it seems obvious from the behavior of China's government that they know it is a lab leak. If it wasn't a lab leak, then presumably there is an animal reser

IMO, it seems obvious from the behavior of China's government that they know it is a lab leak. If it wasn't a lab leak, then presumably there is an animal reservoir of the virus somewhere in China, but as far as I know they haven't claimed to have found it. But if there is an animal reservoir of the virus in China, then how could the Chinese government ever expect a lockdown to work? A lockdown on travel would only really prevent the virus spreading from people bringing it into the country but obviously wild animals would still be spreading it. Yet the Chinese government claimed that their lockdowns did work. How is that at all compatible with the virus being from wild animals and not being a lab leak? It doesn't make any sense.

unicornmama 4y ago
Lockdowns serve a purpose: to slow the spread of the virus.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  That’s not what china was doing though. They were attempting total elimination.
  - HKH2 4y ago
    Exactly. How can a zero transmission rate be anything else?
- jcadam 4y ago
  [flagged]
- psychlops 4y ago
  Lockdowns serve many purposes, not simply the stated one. They also have many side effects.
- jandrese 4y ago
  Also to give people time to develop the vaccine for the virus. Lockdown until the vaccine is administered to the community is a sound policy.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    It took over a year to deploy the Covid vaccines. You want people to lockdown for 1-2 years when a new outbreak happens?
    - jandrese 4y ago
      Depends on your goal. If you want to minimize deaths then you don't have a lot of options. If you want to maximize profit then letting people just die is cheaper, assuming you aren't counting medical expenses.
      - midoridensha 4y ago
        Locking people up for a year is probably going to cause many other problems that will lead to early deaths, so I don't see that as necessarily a good way of minimizing deaths. We're already seeing that Covid has disrupted many aspects of peoples' social lives, probably leading to a decrease in the birth rate, for instance, plus causing other health issues like depression. Just letting the disease run rampant doesn't necessarily maximize profit either: if all your workers get sick and a bunch of them die, that's going to cause a huge impact on your profits, even in the relatively short term, let alone the long term when there's a labor shortage and a decrease in demand.
        jandrese 4y ago
        You would be hard pressed to find more than a handful of deaths attributed to "being in lockdown", especially when compared against the 6.5 million extra deaths from COVID. Economists tend to see workers as replaceable cogs, so deaths aren't a major factor until it starts affecting the labor supply. To maximize income in cases like this the best strategy is to get your entire workforce sick at once, take the two weeks off, then hire enough people to replace the 5% that died so you can get back to work as fast as possible. Also, make sure to suspend all health benefits for the two weeks to make sure nobody tries to use expensive hospital stays. You probably think this sounds extreme, but it's a real strategy (apart from suspending health insurance) that some powerful people were very angry about not being able to implement due to government interference.
- unicornmama 4y ago
  -1 clueless downvotes and 6 clueless replies. If you can’t understand that slowing the spread (exponential growth factor) in a pandemic is priority number 1, and can’t understand that lockdowns serve that purpose then take up knitting or pottery or something and stop commenting on pandemics. China is a highly population dense country with incredible means of public transit, and millions of people moving back and forth every day: these factors all serve to increase the exponential spread of the virus. Slowing the rate of infection helps reduce hospital and equipment overload, gives more time to develop a vaccine, and increases each individual’s chances of survival when they do become ill. ^ If you can’t understand the above then pottery and knitting.
boxed 4y ago
Of course there's a reservoir. That's why there was a lab in the first place. There are many more viruses in those caves. Many many. And tourists literally pay money to go into such caves, and look up to the ceiling to look at the bats. Bats that may at any time shit into their eye with one of these new viruses. And then on top of that people catch them and sell them live to slaughter them at home to eat. Again, this is all well known and the reason the lab was there in the first place. That's why the techs go into these caves wearing full haz mat. Unlike the tourists who are oblivious. Not saying it's not a lab leak. But you seem confused about some basics facts...
- goolulusaurs 4y ago
  Well its been years, why haven't they found the reservoir yet then? They would obviously want to since it would prove that it wasn't a lab leak, yet as far as I know they haven't claimed to have found it yet.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - yibg 4y ago
    Maybe because they are not easy to find? How long did it take to find SARS reservoir?
    - weaksauce 4y ago
      looked it up and it seems they found the source of SARS from 2002-2004 in 2017 so a bit over a decade.
      - baja_blast 4y ago
        Not true, it took them a few months. In this paper published in 2003: > "Civet cats, a raccoon dog, and a ferret badger in an animal market in Gunagdong, China, were infected with a coronavirus identical to the one that causes SARS in humans save for an extra 29-nucleotide sequence" which demonstrated that these animals had a very close ancestral virus circulating within their populations. Source: https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs. You're mistaking ancestral origin with proximal origin. It took a decade to find the bat virus that infected the civet cats, but the intermediate host responsible for the spillover was found within months.
crazygringo 4y ago
> But if there is an animal reservoir of the virus in China, then how could the Chinese government ever expect a lockdown to work? Because if people avoid contact with the animals and it's a rare type of human-animal interaction to begin with, then it doesn't spread. And if you catch it again, you lock down instantly locally again. I'm not taking any side on the source of the virus, but I don't think the Chinese government behavior makes either option more likely. Once vaccines had been developed, the Chinese lockdown went on for way longer than reason could ever have dictated, since Covid had turned endemic in the rest of the world. The extreme lockdown was never a good example of rational health policy in any scenario, post-vaccine.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- goolulusaurs 4y ago
  Sure, but don't they have a vast network of contact tracing? Presumably if a bunch of cases showed up that weren't connected to any other cases because of the lockdowns then that would be a really good indication of where the animal reservoir was located. But they haven't found the animal reservoir yet either, even with all of the lockdowns.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    If by 'animal reservoir' you mean the intermediary pangolin, or something similar, this 'reservoir' could be as small as 1 animal if it was a spontaneous mutation. Where do you get the idea that there must be a large population of such animals roaming around?
    - Teever 4y ago
      Wasn't the intermediate pangolin idea also discredited as exceedingly improbable relatively early in the pandemic?
      - MichaelZuo 4y ago
tim333 4y ago
There are other Chinese government behaviours also. If it wasn't a lab leak why not publish the Wuhan labs database which was public until the outbreak? I know they say hacking but they could just make a copy and upload it somewhere. Also after Xi's first speech on covid his civil servants put out instructions to improve biosecurity at the virus labs. And lots of little things that seem a bit odd.
- dmix 4y ago
  The only counterpoints are a) China is highly insular and rarely plays ball on even basic stuff and b) the whole Chinese idea of "saving face" where even when a person in power obviously messes up you still don't take the Western "brutally honest" approach, you do the opposite and pretend everything is still normal out of 'respect' (and in protection) of the person's social standing. The consequences happen quietly behind doors. China not playing ball is like saying "I won't even give such a suggestion my time, how dare you ask me that". That said - I fully agree it would have done leagues to help the narratives if they did play ball. Hell, the suggestion is that it was an accident in the first place. That should say enough on it's own if it's true.
  - BLKNSLVR 4y ago
    > the Western "brutally honest" approach Yeah, not so much these days, and probably not ever to extent that you may have meant it. Western folks are learning pretty quickly how well total reality denial has been working for... other regimes. I am going to say Trump, but if I'm going to do that then I also need to mention an absolute procession of Western political and business leaders. Biden, Obama, Bush, Bush, Clinton, Abbot, Turnbull (he denied mathematics for god's sake), Morrison, Blair, Jobs, Ellison, Gates, Hoover, and so many other names I cbf remembering or looking up. In fact, I think the "brutally honest" approach is exceedingly rare and always has been, in any arena in any hemisphere.
    - dmix 4y ago
      I was talking about the contrasts with western culture as a whole. Not petty national-level US political discourse via their pet D.C. reporters.
conception 4y ago
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9 It took years to discover the location for the SARS bats. China is large, undeveloped and has lots and lots of bats.
- baja_blast 4y ago
  But it took months to find the intermediate host: Paper from 2003 finding the virus that spilled over into humans in an animal sampled in the market https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs.
yieldcrv 4y ago
There are many autonomous aspects of China. Just like we in the US have 6 federal agencies doing separate investigations barely sharing anything and coming to different conclusions. Despite Beijing’s absolute power over everything there, the National Standing Committee has lots of people to please too and thats just in Beijing. There are provincial governments and stuff too. Rules for rulers.
jopsen 4y ago
> it seems obvious from the behavior of China's government that they know it is a lab leak. I don't think anyone in China knows what happened. It seems entirely likely that it was covered up at multiple levels until it couldn't be. And that each level won't know about the other cover ups. I think it's entirely possible that the system in China doesn't have the capacity to know. Similarly, they probably covered up the death toll by not counting. So it's entirely likely that the Chinese government doesn't know the true number. > Yet the Chinese government claimed that their lockdowns did work. Why would the be a correlation between what the "Chinese government says" and reality.
__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
I agree. But I still don't think it adequately explains why the Chinese lockdown effort was so much more intense than everywhere else's. That is, unless they also know something about its function that the rest of the world doesn't know.
intrasight 4y ago
IMO also it is obvious. And that was before a friend told me that his wife, who worked with the lab director, said it was a lab leak and that the Chinese govt had ordered all the lab notes destroyed.

unicornmama 4y ago

Lockdowns serve a purpose: to slow the spread of the virus.

Gigachad 4y ago
That’s not what china was doing though. They were attempting total elimination.
- HKH2 4y ago
  Exactly. How can a zero transmission rate be anything else?
jcadam 4y ago
[flagged]
psychlops 4y ago
Lockdowns serve many purposes, not simply the stated one. They also have many side effects.
jandrese 4y ago
Also to give people time to develop the vaccine for the virus. Lockdown until the vaccine is administered to the community is a sound policy.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  It took over a year to deploy the Covid vaccines. You want people to lockdown for 1-2 years when a new outbreak happens?
  - jandrese 4y ago
    Depends on your goal. If you want to minimize deaths then you don't have a lot of options. If you want to maximize profit then letting people just die is cheaper, assuming you aren't counting medical expenses.
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      Locking people up for a year is probably going to cause many other problems that will lead to early deaths, so I don't see that as necessarily a good way of minimizing deaths. We're already seeing that Covid has disrupted many aspects of peoples' social lives, probably leading to a decrease in the birth rate, for instance, plus causing other health issues like depression. Just letting the disease run rampant doesn't necessarily maximize profit either: if all your workers get sick and a bunch of them die, that's going to cause a huge impact on your profits, even in the relatively short term, let alone the long term when there's a labor shortage and a decrease in demand.
      - jandrese 4y ago
        You would be hard pressed to find more than a handful of deaths attributed to "being in lockdown", especially when compared against the 6.5 million extra deaths from COVID. Economists tend to see workers as replaceable cogs, so deaths aren't a major factor until it starts affecting the labor supply. To maximize income in cases like this the best strategy is to get your entire workforce sick at once, take the two weeks off, then hire enough people to replace the 5% that died so you can get back to work as fast as possible. Also, make sure to suspend all health benefits for the two weeks to make sure nobody tries to use expensive hospital stays. You probably think this sounds extreme, but it's a real strategy (apart from suspending health insurance) that some powerful people were very angry about not being able to implement due to government interference.
unicornmama 4y ago
-1 clueless downvotes and 6 clueless replies. If you can’t understand that slowing the spread (exponential growth factor) in a pandemic is priority number 1, and can’t understand that lockdowns serve that purpose then take up knitting or pottery or something and stop commenting on pandemics. China is a highly population dense country with incredible means of public transit, and millions of people moving back and forth every day: these factors all serve to increase the exponential spread of the virus. Slowing the rate of infection helps reduce hospital and equipment overload, gives more time to develop a vaccine, and increases each individual’s chances of survival when they do become ill. ^ If you can’t understand the above then pottery and knitting.

boxed 4y ago

Of course there's a reservoir. That's why there was a lab in the first place. There are many more viruses in those caves. Many many. And tourists literally pay money to go into such caves, and look up to the ceiling to look at the bats. Bats that may at any time shit into their eye with one of these new viruses. And then on top of that people catch them and sell them live to slaughter them at home to eat. Again, this is all well known and the reason the lab was there in the first place. That's why the techs go into these caves wearing full haz mat. Unlike the tourists who are oblivious. Not saying it's not a lab leak. But you seem confused about some basics facts...

goolulusaurs 4y ago
Well its been years, why haven't they found the reservoir yet then? They would obviously want to since it would prove that it wasn't a lab leak, yet as far as I know they haven't claimed to have found it yet.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- yibg 4y ago
  Maybe because they are not easy to find? How long did it take to find SARS reservoir?
  - weaksauce 4y ago
    looked it up and it seems they found the source of SARS from 2002-2004 in 2017 so a bit over a decade.
    - baja_blast 4y ago
      Not true, it took them a few months. In this paper published in 2003: > "Civet cats, a raccoon dog, and a ferret badger in an animal market in Gunagdong, China, were infected with a coronavirus identical to the one that causes SARS in humans save for an extra 29-nucleotide sequence" which demonstrated that these animals had a very close ancestral virus circulating within their populations. Source: https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs. You're mistaking ancestral origin with proximal origin. It took a decade to find the bat virus that infected the civet cats, but the intermediate host responsible for the spillover was found within months.

crazygringo 4y ago

> But if there is an animal reservoir of the virus in China, then how could the Chinese government ever expect a lockdown to work? Because if people avoid contact with the animals and it's a rare type of human-animal interaction to begin with, then it doesn't spread. And if you catch it again, you lock down instantly locally again. I'm not taking any side on the source of the virus, but I don't think the Chinese government behavior makes either option more likely. Once vaccines had been developed, the Chinese lockdown went on for way longer than reason could ever have dictated, since Covid had turned endemic in the rest of the world. The extreme lockdown was never a good example of rational health policy in any scenario, post-vaccine.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
goolulusaurs 4y ago
Sure, but don't they have a vast network of contact tracing? Presumably if a bunch of cases showed up that weren't connected to any other cases because of the lockdowns then that would be a really good indication of where the animal reservoir was located. But they haven't found the animal reservoir yet either, even with all of the lockdowns.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  If by 'animal reservoir' you mean the intermediary pangolin, or something similar, this 'reservoir' could be as small as 1 animal if it was a spontaneous mutation. Where do you get the idea that there must be a large population of such animals roaming around?
  - Teever 4y ago
    Wasn't the intermediate pangolin idea also discredited as exceedingly improbable relatively early in the pandemic?
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago

tim333 4y ago

There are other Chinese government behaviours also. If it wasn't a lab leak why not publish the Wuhan labs database which was public until the outbreak? I know they say hacking but they could just make a copy and upload it somewhere. Also after Xi's first speech on covid his civil servants put out instructions to improve biosecurity at the virus labs. And lots of little things that seem a bit odd.

dmix 4y ago
The only counterpoints are a) China is highly insular and rarely plays ball on even basic stuff and b) the whole Chinese idea of "saving face" where even when a person in power obviously messes up you still don't take the Western "brutally honest" approach, you do the opposite and pretend everything is still normal out of 'respect' (and in protection) of the person's social standing. The consequences happen quietly behind doors. China not playing ball is like saying "I won't even give such a suggestion my time, how dare you ask me that". That said - I fully agree it would have done leagues to help the narratives if they did play ball. Hell, the suggestion is that it was an accident in the first place. That should say enough on it's own if it's true.
- BLKNSLVR 4y ago
  > the Western "brutally honest" approach Yeah, not so much these days, and probably not ever to extent that you may have meant it. Western folks are learning pretty quickly how well total reality denial has been working for... other regimes. I am going to say Trump, but if I'm going to do that then I also need to mention an absolute procession of Western political and business leaders. Biden, Obama, Bush, Bush, Clinton, Abbot, Turnbull (he denied mathematics for god's sake), Morrison, Blair, Jobs, Ellison, Gates, Hoover, and so many other names I cbf remembering or looking up. In fact, I think the "brutally honest" approach is exceedingly rare and always has been, in any arena in any hemisphere.
  - dmix 4y ago
    I was talking about the contrasts with western culture as a whole. Not petty national-level US political discourse via their pet D.C. reporters.

conception 4y ago

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9 It took years to discover the location for the SARS bats. China is large, undeveloped and has lots and lots of bats.

baja_blast 4y ago
But it took months to find the intermediate host: Paper from 2003 finding the virus that spilled over into humans in an animal sampled in the market https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs.

yieldcrv 4y ago

There are many autonomous aspects of China. Just like we in the US have 6 federal agencies doing separate investigations barely sharing anything and coming to different conclusions. Despite Beijing’s absolute power over everything there, the National Standing Committee has lots of people to please too and thats just in Beijing. There are provincial governments and stuff too. Rules for rulers.

jopsen 4y ago

> it seems obvious from the behavior of China's government that they know it is a lab leak. I don't think anyone in China knows what happened. It seems entirely likely that it was covered up at multiple levels until it couldn't be. And that each level won't know about the other cover ups. I think it's entirely possible that the system in China doesn't have the capacity to know. Similarly, they probably covered up the death toll by not counting. So it's entirely likely that the Chinese government doesn't know the true number. > Yet the Chinese government claimed that their lockdowns did work. Why would the be a correlation between what the "Chinese government says" and reality.

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago

I agree. But I still don't think it adequately explains why the Chinese lockdown effort was so much more intense than everywhere else's. That is, unless they also know something about its function that the rest of the world doesn't know.

intrasight 4y ago

IMO also it is obvious. And that was before a friend told me that his wife, who worked with the lab director, said it was a lab leak and that the Chinese govt had ordered all the lab notes destroyed.