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Note that this is NOT the Wuhan CDC, which is the building across the river from the wet market. They did not do any research there. This building is ~10 mile

Note that this is NOT the Wuhan CDC, which is the building across the river from the wet market. They did not do any research there. This building is ~10 miles south, well outside the main city. https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology&params=30_22_35_N_114_15_45_E_type:landmark_region:CN-42 https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Wuhan_Ins... The fact that researchers were sick with flu-like symptoms has been openly stated by the US for a long time. This was put out in the state department Jan 2021, 2.5 years ago: https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan-institute-of-virology/index.html https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan... > The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. Here's a good post that outlines the frankly huge amount of evidence against the WIV being involved: https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/the-case-against-the-lab-leak-theory-f640ae1c3704 https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/the-case-against-the-... > Based on number of visitors, Worobey estimated the odds at only 1 in 10,000 that the market would be the first superspreading event in Wuhan. > Although it didn’t receive a lot of traffic, the market was one of only 4 places selling wild animals in Wuhan. It’s one of the most likely places for a wildlife spillover. > As we’ll see later, there may actually have been two jumps from animals to people at the market. Now we’re talking about odds of 1 in 100 million, that the virus made it from the lab to the market twice but showed up nowhere else in Wuhan.

onethought 3y ago
Which still doesn’t really draw the line of how an outbreak occurred at the wet market. Also common seasonal illness isn’t exactly a smoking gun
- MarkMarine 3y ago
  not really typical for healthy researchers in their 30s to end up in the hospital with seasonal illness symptoms though.
  - DiogenesKynikos 3y ago
    People go directly to hospitals for primary care in China. It's not the same as the US, where people go to a general practitioner first.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    Perfectly normal for regular, healthy folks to occasionally come down with seasonal flu. Sometimes people get sick, it happens. The issue was that a whole bunch of them did, rapidly, and in non-trivial numbers.
  - hwillis 3y ago
    Did they "end up in the hospital" or did they go to the hospital to get a diagnosis? I live in a city, and my PCP is in the local hospital. "seasonal illness symptoms" sounds FAR more like they were just sick and went to the doctor, like anyone else would. For medicine.
    - MarkMarine 3y ago
      I read it was hospitalized, but who knows with this kind of reporting.
    - ipqk 3y ago
      And what exactly does "hospital" mean in China? I know in India a hospital can basically be a small clinic, not unlike an urgent care center in the USA.
      - hwillis 3y ago
        This is a very large, very modern city. I'm very willing to believe they went to real hospitals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan#/media/File:Wuhan_Yangtze_River_Bridge_in_2020.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan#/media/File:Wuhan_Yangtz...
- nomel 3y ago
  Outbreaks can only happen in places of high density/congregation, by the nature of the required proximity. It could have been dancing around the perimeter for some time. Maybe my perspective is incorrect, but this seems trivially possible to me. This problem with proximity is why kids didn't go to school.
  - hwillis 3y ago
    The wet market was one of the less densely trafficked areas of the city: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9348750/figure/f3/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9348750/figure/... Check out the other figures in that paper. The epicenter was the wet market itself.
    - baja_blast 3y ago
      Here is a thread explaining the flaws in Worobey's paper https://twitter.com/danwalker9999/status/1595653898572042240 https://twitter.com/danwalker9999/status/1595653898572042240
      - hwillis 3y ago
        That's not really relevant. The cases are all still very far away from the WIV, which is itself far from anywhere the thread implicates eg residential areas. I also suspect the thread is just flat wrong- the people most relevant to viral spread are NOT the ones who are only spending part of their day in the city. Its the people who live there and spend all their time there. 2/3rds of the population of Wuhan lives in the urban districts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan#Administrative_divisions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan#Administrative_divisions The people commuting in/out are a small minority. No model is perfect.
      - dekhn 3y ago
        .... written by a geoscientist. There are limits on the ability to transfer knowledge between domains (although this doesn't mean the geoscientist is necessarily wrong, and often even amateurs can find big problems with papers that got through peer review).
- graeme 3y ago
  The market is extremely close to the lab. Within walking distance
  - hwillis 3y ago
    That's the CDC, a totally unrelated building which even then isn't very close to the wet market, which is not a very popular spot in the city. The WIV was many miles outside the city.
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  Supposedly there was a problem for a long time with researchers selling used lab animals on the street to make a bit of extra cash.
  - hwillis 3y ago
    That's ridiculous. The animals are transgenic mice.
    - mike_hearn 3y ago
      Labs experiment on all sorts of animals. Serial passage is often done with ferrets for example.
  - acdha 3y ago
    “Supposedly”? That kind of claim really needs a level of proof beyond “it would be politically convenient if this were true”.
- Vrondi 3y ago
  If a single staff person caught a virus, then anyone they interacted with and gave it to went to the market, then that's all it would take.
  - hwillis 3y ago
    Incredibly unlikely. There are thousands of locations that are far more trafficked than the wet market: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9348750/figure/f3/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9348750/figure/...
notjulianjaynes 3y ago
Slightly off topic, but thanks to your first link I was just doing some satellite image sightseeing of Wuhan and noticed that on Google maps the streets are offset about 3 blocks east of where they should be. It's fairly obvious here [1] where the curved road extends out into a lake. Not saying this means anything, just found it amusing. 1. https://maps.app.goo.gl/reVDkMAhfMRbv1uJ8 https://maps.app.goo.gl/reVDkMAhfMRbv1uJ8
- inetknght 3y ago
  It's fairly well-known [0] that China messes with maps data and forces Google to do so. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_data_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
  - CommitSyn 3y ago
    Is this similar to how the US used to mandate that civilian use of GPS was off by a certain amount?
    - dmoy 3y ago
      Yes, it's ostensibly still for defense purposes in China
    - Apes 3y ago
      A bit different. The GPS restriction was to prevent GPS on a device moving over 400 mph (I think that's roughly the speed?), and to limit accuracy to within a few meters rather than a few centimeters. The restrictions were intended to prevent the use of civilian GPS systems in precision missiles. Not a lot of civilian uses require anywhere near that speed or accuracy. It's a lot harder to justify grossly inaccurate geographic data as not hurting civilian uses.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - 3y ago
quad_eye_oh 3y ago
I haven't looked at where Ben Hu's lab is, but epidemiological distance in urban areas doesn't necessarily follow map distance. In particular, proximity to a shared subway or bus line can be more important than physical proximity, since many commuters will put up with longer travel times if they can tune out, and a packed rush hour subway car is a great place for the spread of airborne infectious diseases. (In US cities one might consider two homes epidemiologically close despite a 10 mile separation if their children take the same school bus.)
- hwillis 3y ago
  The CDC is smack in the center of the city (on the other side of the river). The WIV is way outside the urban area, past a very large industrial park. The distribution of cases also strongly contradicts you: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9348750/figure/f2/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9348750/figure/... Cases were roundly distributed, not along any particular artery. Note that the WIV is not even close to being in frame there- that's how much farther away it is.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - mharig 3y ago
    AFAIK, there is a Biolab of a Wuhan University rather near the market. BSL3. Choose your odds.
autokad 3y ago
just a guess, but mid august was the first outbreak and September 21st was when they realized it was out of control.
INTPenis 3y ago
>became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses I was in Thailand in february 2019 and came down with SARS-like symptoms that were very similar to Covid-19 once that became known. SARS-like viruses have been going around for a while, meaning they affect the respiratory system. Doesn't mean it was covid-19, what even differentiates SARS from covid-19? I have no idea, I'm just a layman who happened to get sick.
- pests 3y ago
  Covid-19 is the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. From [0]: > Through DivErsity pArtitioning by hieRarchical Clustering-based analyses,5 the newly emerged coronavirus was deemed not sufficiently novel but is a sister virus to SARS-CoV, the primary viral isolate defining the species. The SARS-CoV species includes viruses such as SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV_PC4-227, and SARSr-CoV-btKY72. SARS-CoV-2 is the newest member of this viral species. The use of SARS in naming SARS-CoV-2 does not derive from the name of the SARS disease but is a natural extension of the taxonomic practice for viruses in the SARS species. The use of SARS for viruses in this species mainly refers to their taxonomic relationship to the founding virus of this species, SARS-CoV. In other words, viruses in this species can be named SARS regardless of whether or not they cause SARS-like diseases. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7133598 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7133598
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bunga-bunga 3y ago
  > SARS-like symptoms Aren’t SARS-like symptoms just flu-like? I heard the same exact thing from an European friend and again I think it’s Barnum effect-like. Given the transmissibility of the virus, I doubt that it was in the wild unnoticed for 12+ months before suddenly affecting millions in weeks.
  - INTPenis 3y ago
    Sort of but what made me think I had SARS specifically was the fact that I had this weird cough that persisted for a month after I recovered from the worst of the flu symptoms. That was very unusual to me. During the actual week or two I was sick I had all the symptoms of Covid, diarrhea, shortness of breath, and the rest of normal flu symptoms. And when I recovered I remember eating a protein shake just because I couldn't eat anything else and I needed energy, and I remember not tasting it. I'm not saying it went unnoticed for a year, it's just an interesting thing that happened to me that I didn't pay attention to until after covid was detected. I even know how I got sick, it was on the plane from Copenhagen to Doha. Two thai guys were sitting next to us and one of them was visibly sick. We felt pity on him and offered him a pillow or candy sometimes. Then 1 day after we landed in Udon Thani we both got sick.
burnished 3y ago
Neat, thanks for that last link. It could use a table of contents but it did contain more information related to the DEFUSE grant proposal which is what I have thought of as being indicative of a lab leak. Sadly that article doesn't disprove that theory, but it does detail its weaknesses which is a good enough jumping off point for further reading.
scythe 3y ago
>As we’ll see later, there may actually have been two jumps from animals to people at the market. Mixing fact with speculation is never a great sign for an argument. Many people pushing the lab leak theory are doing this, but the people pushing against it don't need to start. If there were two spillovers, that needs a very good explanation, particularly because events like this tend to fall into the categories "one" and "many" — if there were two spillovers, why not three or four? Why not a whole gaggle of infected raccoon dogs? > Based on number of visitors, Worobey estimated the odds at only 1 in 10,000 that the market would be the first superspreading event in Wuhan. This is based on a location analysis of early cases around Wuhan. That doesn't imply that the first event was at the market, only near the market. In particular, the market is across the street from a railway station and one block away from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology Tongji Medical College Union Hospital. Huazhong University of Science and Technology is one of China's top ten universities and might have a pretty good hospital.
- kuhewa 3y ago
  Have you read the brace of Science papers that analysed the market data
- hwillis 3y ago
  > Mixing fact with speculation is never a great sign for an argument. You're the only one who's speculating, because in the page that sentence links to a scientific paper: https://zenodo.org/record/6342616#.Y_WrmnbMJD- https://zenodo.org/record/6342616#.Y_WrmnbMJD- > In particular, the market is across the street from a railway station Which can be trivially ruled out, because then the spread would have been all up and down the rail line. The first infection point would have been on the train, among all those people getting off at all different stops. It would not have suddenly become infectious just as that person stepped off the train. > and one block away from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology Tongji Medical College Union Hospital. The evidence for zoonotic origin is how people regularly found or contracted SARS-like coronaviruses from animals. The evidence there was any relevant research at that university is zero. It's not a government lab, those projects would have been public.

onethought 3y ago

Which still doesn’t really draw the line of how an outbreak occurred at the wet market. Also common seasonal illness isn’t exactly a smoking gun

MarkMarine 3y ago
not really typical for healthy researchers in their 30s to end up in the hospital with seasonal illness symptoms though.
- DiogenesKynikos 3y ago
  People go directly to hospitals for primary care in China. It's not the same as the US, where people go to a general practitioner first.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  Perfectly normal for regular, healthy folks to occasionally come down with seasonal flu. Sometimes people get sick, it happens. The issue was that a whole bunch of them did, rapidly, and in non-trivial numbers.
- hwillis 3y ago
  Did they "end up in the hospital" or did they go to the hospital to get a diagnosis? I live in a city, and my PCP is in the local hospital. "seasonal illness symptoms" sounds FAR more like they were just sick and went to the doctor, like anyone else would. For medicine.
  - MarkMarine 3y ago
    I read it was hospitalized, but who knows with this kind of reporting.
  - ipqk 3y ago
    And what exactly does "hospital" mean in China? I know in India a hospital can basically be a small clinic, not unlike an urgent care center in the USA.
    - hwillis 3y ago
      This is a very large, very modern city. I'm very willing to believe they went to real hospitals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan#/media/File:Wuhan_Yangtze_River_Bridge_in_2020.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan#/media/File:Wuhan_Yangtz...
nomel 3y ago
Outbreaks can only happen in places of high density/congregation, by the nature of the required proximity. It could have been dancing around the perimeter for some time. Maybe my perspective is incorrect, but this seems trivially possible to me. This problem with proximity is why kids didn't go to school.
- hwillis 3y ago
  The wet market was one of the less densely trafficked areas of the city: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9348750/figure/f3/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9348750/figure/... Check out the other figures in that paper. The epicenter was the wet market itself.
  - baja_blast 3y ago
    Here is a thread explaining the flaws in Worobey's paper https://twitter.com/danwalker9999/status/1595653898572042240 https://twitter.com/danwalker9999/status/1595653898572042240
    - hwillis 3y ago
      That's not really relevant. The cases are all still very far away from the WIV, which is itself far from anywhere the thread implicates eg residential areas. I also suspect the thread is just flat wrong- the people most relevant to viral spread are NOT the ones who are only spending part of their day in the city. Its the people who live there and spend all their time there. 2/3rds of the population of Wuhan lives in the urban districts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan#Administrative_divisions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan#Administrative_divisions The people commuting in/out are a small minority. No model is perfect.
    - dekhn 3y ago
      .... written by a geoscientist. There are limits on the ability to transfer knowledge between domains (although this doesn't mean the geoscientist is necessarily wrong, and often even amateurs can find big problems with papers that got through peer review).
graeme 3y ago
The market is extremely close to the lab. Within walking distance
- hwillis 3y ago
  That's the CDC, a totally unrelated building which even then isn't very close to the wet market, which is not a very popular spot in the city. The WIV was many miles outside the city.
mike_hearn 3y ago
Supposedly there was a problem for a long time with researchers selling used lab animals on the street to make a bit of extra cash.
- hwillis 3y ago
  That's ridiculous. The animals are transgenic mice.
  - mike_hearn 3y ago
    Labs experiment on all sorts of animals. Serial passage is often done with ferrets for example.
- acdha 3y ago
  “Supposedly”? That kind of claim really needs a level of proof beyond “it would be politically convenient if this were true”.
Vrondi 3y ago
If a single staff person caught a virus, then anyone they interacted with and gave it to went to the market, then that's all it would take.
- hwillis 3y ago
  Incredibly unlikely. There are thousands of locations that are far more trafficked than the wet market: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9348750/figure/f3/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9348750/figure/...

notjulianjaynes 3y ago

Slightly off topic, but thanks to your first link I was just doing some satellite image sightseeing of Wuhan and noticed that on Google maps the streets are offset about 3 blocks east of where they should be. It's fairly obvious here [1] where the curved road extends out into a lake. Not saying this means anything, just found it amusing. 1. https://maps.app.goo.gl/reVDkMAhfMRbv1uJ8 https://maps.app.goo.gl/reVDkMAhfMRbv1uJ8

inetknght 3y ago
It's fairly well-known [0] that China messes with maps data and forces Google to do so. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_data_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
- CommitSyn 3y ago
  Is this similar to how the US used to mandate that civilian use of GPS was off by a certain amount?
  - dmoy 3y ago
    Yes, it's ostensibly still for defense purposes in China
  - Apes 3y ago
    A bit different. The GPS restriction was to prevent GPS on a device moving over 400 mph (I think that's roughly the speed?), and to limit accuracy to within a few meters rather than a few centimeters. The restrictions were intended to prevent the use of civilian GPS systems in precision missiles. Not a lot of civilian uses require anywhere near that speed or accuracy. It's a lot harder to justify grossly inaccurate geographic data as not hurting civilian uses.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - 3y ago

quad_eye_oh 3y ago

I haven't looked at where Ben Hu's lab is, but epidemiological distance in urban areas doesn't necessarily follow map distance. In particular, proximity to a shared subway or bus line can be more important than physical proximity, since many commuters will put up with longer travel times if they can tune out, and a packed rush hour subway car is a great place for the spread of airborne infectious diseases. (In US cities one might consider two homes epidemiologically close despite a 10 mile separation if their children take the same school bus.)

hwillis 3y ago
The CDC is smack in the center of the city (on the other side of the river). The WIV is way outside the urban area, past a very large industrial park. The distribution of cases also strongly contradicts you: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9348750/figure/f2/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9348750/figure/... Cases were roundly distributed, not along any particular artery. Note that the WIV is not even close to being in frame there- that's how much farther away it is.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mharig 3y ago
  AFAIK, there is a Biolab of a Wuhan University rather near the market. BSL3. Choose your odds.

autokad 3y ago

just a guess, but mid august was the first outbreak and September 21st was when they realized it was out of control.

INTPenis 3y ago

>became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses I was in Thailand in february 2019 and came down with SARS-like symptoms that were very similar to Covid-19 once that became known. SARS-like viruses have been going around for a while, meaning they affect the respiratory system. Doesn't mean it was covid-19, what even differentiates SARS from covid-19? I have no idea, I'm just a layman who happened to get sick.

pests 3y ago
Covid-19 is the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. From [0]: > Through DivErsity pArtitioning by hieRarchical Clustering-based analyses,5 the newly emerged coronavirus was deemed not sufficiently novel but is a sister virus to SARS-CoV, the primary viral isolate defining the species. The SARS-CoV species includes viruses such as SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV_PC4-227, and SARSr-CoV-btKY72. SARS-CoV-2 is the newest member of this viral species. The use of SARS in naming SARS-CoV-2 does not derive from the name of the SARS disease but is a natural extension of the taxonomic practice for viruses in the SARS species. The use of SARS for viruses in this species mainly refers to their taxonomic relationship to the founding virus of this species, SARS-CoV. In other words, viruses in this species can be named SARS regardless of whether or not they cause SARS-like diseases. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7133598 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7133598
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bunga-bunga 3y ago
> SARS-like symptoms Aren’t SARS-like symptoms just flu-like? I heard the same exact thing from an European friend and again I think it’s Barnum effect-like. Given the transmissibility of the virus, I doubt that it was in the wild unnoticed for 12+ months before suddenly affecting millions in weeks.
- INTPenis 3y ago
  Sort of but what made me think I had SARS specifically was the fact that I had this weird cough that persisted for a month after I recovered from the worst of the flu symptoms. That was very unusual to me. During the actual week or two I was sick I had all the symptoms of Covid, diarrhea, shortness of breath, and the rest of normal flu symptoms. And when I recovered I remember eating a protein shake just because I couldn't eat anything else and I needed energy, and I remember not tasting it. I'm not saying it went unnoticed for a year, it's just an interesting thing that happened to me that I didn't pay attention to until after covid was detected. I even know how I got sick, it was on the plane from Copenhagen to Doha. Two thai guys were sitting next to us and one of them was visibly sick. We felt pity on him and offered him a pillow or candy sometimes. Then 1 day after we landed in Udon Thani we both got sick.

burnished 3y ago

Neat, thanks for that last link. It could use a table of contents but it did contain more information related to the DEFUSE grant proposal which is what I have thought of as being indicative of a lab leak. Sadly that article doesn't disprove that theory, but it does detail its weaknesses which is a good enough jumping off point for further reading.

scythe 3y ago

>As we’ll see later, there may actually have been two jumps from animals to people at the market. Mixing fact with speculation is never a great sign for an argument. Many people pushing the lab leak theory are doing this, but the people pushing against it don't need to start. If there were two spillovers, that needs a very good explanation, particularly because events like this tend to fall into the categories "one" and "many" — if there were two spillovers, why not three or four? Why not a whole gaggle of infected raccoon dogs? > Based on number of visitors, Worobey estimated the odds at only 1 in 10,000 that the market would be the first superspreading event in Wuhan. This is based on a location analysis of early cases around Wuhan. That doesn't imply that the first event was at the market, only near the market. In particular, the market is across the street from a railway station and one block away from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology Tongji Medical College Union Hospital. Huazhong University of Science and Technology is one of China's top ten universities and might have a pretty good hospital.

kuhewa 3y ago
Have you read the brace of Science papers that analysed the market data
hwillis 3y ago
> Mixing fact with speculation is never a great sign for an argument. You're the only one who's speculating, because in the page that sentence links to a scientific paper: https://zenodo.org/record/6342616#.Y_WrmnbMJD- https://zenodo.org/record/6342616#.Y_WrmnbMJD- > In particular, the market is across the street from a railway station Which can be trivially ruled out, because then the spread would have been all up and down the rail line. The first infection point would have been on the train, among all those people getting off at all different stops. It would not have suddenly become infectious just as that person stepped off the train. > and one block away from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology Tongji Medical College Union Hospital. The evidence for zoonotic origin is how people regularly found or contracted SARS-like coronaviruses from animals. The evidence there was any relevant research at that university is zero. It's not a government lab, those projects would have been public.