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There's many thousands more contact between bats and humans involved in mining (literally how RaTG13 and the Mojiang mine, bat guano collection for farming and

There's many thousands more contact between bats and humans involved in mining (literally how RaTG13 and the Mojiang mine, bat guano collection for farming and just tourism: https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/33905/20211012/china-rejects-who-investigation-hubei-wildlife-tourists-enjoy-enshi-bat.htm https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/33905/20211012/china-r... There's a lot of economic activity in China that is close to bat habitats and there's evidence that cross reactivity to sarbecoviruses exists in a significant amount in rural china. The researchers collecting samples were a very tiny slice of the human-to-bat-virus exposure that is going on in China all the time. And we know that SARS-CoV-2 doesn't last very long on surfaces, it isn't transmitted by fomites. It needs to be aerosolized and breathed in. It isn't likely that the researchers were collecting live viable virus in the samples that they brought back to the lab. What they were sequencing was overwhelmingly going to be "dead" mRNA. The idea that the lab researchers were the initial Typhoid Mary of the pandemic is also simply not believable because it requires one to believe that they lived within a bubble EXCEPT for one trip to the wet market where the outbreak happened. They didn't start spreading it around their apartment building, they didn't infect people in restaurants, didn't infect elderly relatives who wound up in the hospital, etc. It makes "more" sense that they deliberately genetically engineered the virus and released it in the wet market entirely on purpose.

tripletao 4y ago
> The idea that the lab researchers were the initial Typhoid Mary of the pandemic is also simply not believable because it requires one to believe that they lived within a bubble EXCEPT for one trip to the wet market where the outbreak happened. Except that SARS-CoV-2's epidemiological dynamics are well-known to be overdispersed? Almost all lineages die out, and a few explode due to repeated super-spreader events. It's therefore unlikely that the first cluster will be discovered at the site of introduction. For example, SARS-CoV-2 was presumably first introduced to other continents at airports and seaports; but that's not where the first clusters were found.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  Explain the coincidence of why it happened to be in a wet market and not a restaurant or other gathering where people congregate. Just happened to be the one place to make it look exactly like zoonosis and extraordinarily similar to SARS-1.
  - tripletao 4y ago
    If you think SARS-CoV-2 arose naturally in the same city as the world's biggest laboratory collection of sarbecoviruses (which I do agree is possible), then you must agree that weird coincidences do happen sometimes? A wet market is crowded and poorly-ventilated, so it's a great place for a respiratory virus to spread, regardless of how it got introduced. There's also the question of ascertainment bias, whether cases were found in the wet market simply because that's where the authorities looked. I assume you've seen those endless debates, which seem basically unresolvable to me given the limited information available.
    - lamontcg 4y ago
      The pandemic happening in the same city as WIV isn't really that much of a coincidence. The virus needed a large densely packed city to really take off. Wuhan is the biggest city in central China. The catchment area around Wuhan for where a virus would follow the animal trade to the city is probably large. Wuhan is also a good candidate for a centrally located lab. That only seems like a 5-10% low probability chance, which happens (it is also the second time it happened in China and the first time looked like this one, only it hit Guangzhou where there was no lab). The infected lab worker causing exactly one massive superspreading event in the wet market without infecting anyone else, making it look exactly like zoonotic spillover, without leaving any other contacts around Wuhan is much less believable to me. That sounds like a thousand to one odds or much worse.
      - tripletao 4y ago
        > The infected lab worker causing exactly one massive superspreading event in the wet market without infecting anyone else, That's indeed unlikely, but it's a strawman. As I've noted repeatedly above, most lineages die out. If the introduction into humans occurred outside the market (naturally or otherwise), then it's quite likely that patient infected others outside the market; those lineages just died out. I remember Trevor Bedford showing genomic evidence of all the failed introductions into Seattle before the spread finally went exponential, early in the pandemic. Pekar et al. is basically a more sophisticated version of your argument, with numerical models of the phylogenetic and epidemiological dynamics. I don't think it's convincing (since they chose their power law pretty arbitrarily), but at least they acknowledge and purport to model that stochasticity.

tripletao 4y ago

> The idea that the lab researchers were the initial Typhoid Mary of the pandemic is also simply not believable because it requires one to believe that they lived within a bubble EXCEPT for one trip to the wet market where the outbreak happened. Except that SARS-CoV-2's epidemiological dynamics are well-known to be overdispersed? Almost all lineages die out, and a few explode due to repeated super-spreader events. It's therefore unlikely that the first cluster will be discovered at the site of introduction. For example, SARS-CoV-2 was presumably first introduced to other continents at airports and seaports; but that's not where the first clusters were found.

lamontcg 4y ago
Explain the coincidence of why it happened to be in a wet market and not a restaurant or other gathering where people congregate. Just happened to be the one place to make it look exactly like zoonosis and extraordinarily similar to SARS-1.
- tripletao 4y ago
  If you think SARS-CoV-2 arose naturally in the same city as the world's biggest laboratory collection of sarbecoviruses (which I do agree is possible), then you must agree that weird coincidences do happen sometimes? A wet market is crowded and poorly-ventilated, so it's a great place for a respiratory virus to spread, regardless of how it got introduced. There's also the question of ascertainment bias, whether cases were found in the wet market simply because that's where the authorities looked. I assume you've seen those endless debates, which seem basically unresolvable to me given the limited information available.
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    The pandemic happening in the same city as WIV isn't really that much of a coincidence. The virus needed a large densely packed city to really take off. Wuhan is the biggest city in central China. The catchment area around Wuhan for where a virus would follow the animal trade to the city is probably large. Wuhan is also a good candidate for a centrally located lab. That only seems like a 5-10% low probability chance, which happens (it is also the second time it happened in China and the first time looked like this one, only it hit Guangzhou where there was no lab). The infected lab worker causing exactly one massive superspreading event in the wet market without infecting anyone else, making it look exactly like zoonotic spillover, without leaving any other contacts around Wuhan is much less believable to me. That sounds like a thousand to one odds or much worse.
    - tripletao 4y ago
      > The infected lab worker causing exactly one massive superspreading event in the wet market without infecting anyone else, That's indeed unlikely, but it's a strawman. As I've noted repeatedly above, most lineages die out. If the introduction into humans occurred outside the market (naturally or otherwise), then it's quite likely that patient infected others outside the market; those lineages just died out. I remember Trevor Bedford showing genomic evidence of all the failed introductions into Seattle before the spread finally went exponential, early in the pandemic. Pekar et al. is basically a more sophisticated version of your argument, with numerical models of the phylogenetic and epidemiological dynamics. I don't think it's convincing (since they chose their power law pretty arbitrarily), but at least they acknowledge and purport to model that stochasticity.