5 ms·

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.ni

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).
  - Sunhold 3y ago
    The geoscientist in question is actually arguing that some of the flaws in the paper are due to the authors' lack of expertise in geospatial analysis.[1] [1] https://twitter.com/search?q=(from%3Adanwalker9999)%20expertise&src=typed_query&f=top https://twitter.com/search?q=(from%3Adanwalker9999)%20expert...
    - dekhn 3y ago
      that may be- I am not qualified to say after reading the twitter thread, but my money is still on the peer reviewed paper written by the virologist, based on a large collection of priors. Note taht the "geoscientist" is really a hydrologist who works on oil and gas, so their ability to comment on the centering model is still suspect. From what I can tell, "dawalker" is just a retired hydrologist with no special skills in this sort of analysis, especially in an biological contexgt. We are dealing with situations where smart people are using social media to promote propaganda in response to academic publications. Twitter as a medium is not really the best place to carry out these sorts of discussions- for exmaple, when I read walker's tweets, they jump all over the place and make many different arguments which are incomplete. If he really has a problem he should take his case to retraction watch and get the paper retracted if it contains invalidating errors.
      - mandmandam 3y ago
        If you read the linked thread, you might actually be able to engage with the argument on its merits, without resorting to ad hominems and appeals to authority.
        dekhn 3y ago
        I read the thread. It's not that interesting.
      - tripletao 3y ago
        The peer-reviewed literature on COVID origins has been unusually bad. I assume you don't think SARS-CoV-2 came from pangolins; but Nature published "Isolation of SARS-CoV-2-related coronavirus from Malayan pangolins", and took more than a year to correct it. (They said the virus was widespread among pangolins, based on multiple positive samples; but in fact multiple papers had been written about one batch of smuggled pangolins.) Map-based arguments for the exact site of introduction seem generally like noise to me. Worobey has made aggressive claims in preprints and media interviews, but even his Science paper falls back to just "epicenter", a weaker term without standard epidemiological meaning. SARS-CoV-2 must have been introduced into the Americas at air and seaports; but even with the advance warning to public health officials, that's not where the first clusters were found.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nomel 3y ago
"Epicenter" does not mean "origin", by any definition of the word. The epicenter is a statistical thing, in this context, not an origin thing. The epicenter of COVID in the US was New York [1]. The origin of COVID was not New York. This is no different than the epicenter being the wet market, but the origin possibly being somewhere else. "Epicenter: the part of the earth's surface directly above the focus of an earthquake" It's all probability of intercept. Density and frequency are important. Relative-to-a-mall probably isn't super useful, in a city with 11 million. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6946a2.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6946a2.htm

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).
- Sunhold 3y ago
  The geoscientist in question is actually arguing that some of the flaws in the paper are due to the authors' lack of expertise in geospatial analysis.[1] [1] https://twitter.com/search?q=(from%3Adanwalker9999)%20expertise&src=typed_query&f=top https://twitter.com/search?q=(from%3Adanwalker9999)%20expert...
  - dekhn 3y ago
    that may be- I am not qualified to say after reading the twitter thread, but my money is still on the peer reviewed paper written by the virologist, based on a large collection of priors. Note taht the "geoscientist" is really a hydrologist who works on oil and gas, so their ability to comment on the centering model is still suspect. From what I can tell, "dawalker" is just a retired hydrologist with no special skills in this sort of analysis, especially in an biological contexgt. We are dealing with situations where smart people are using social media to promote propaganda in response to academic publications. Twitter as a medium is not really the best place to carry out these sorts of discussions- for exmaple, when I read walker's tweets, they jump all over the place and make many different arguments which are incomplete. If he really has a problem he should take his case to retraction watch and get the paper retracted if it contains invalidating errors.
    - mandmandam 3y ago
      If you read the linked thread, you might actually be able to engage with the argument on its merits, without resorting to ad hominems and appeals to authority.
      - dekhn 3y ago
        I read the thread. It's not that interesting.
    - tripletao 3y ago
      The peer-reviewed literature on COVID origins has been unusually bad. I assume you don't think SARS-CoV-2 came from pangolins; but Nature published "Isolation of SARS-CoV-2-related coronavirus from Malayan pangolins", and took more than a year to correct it. (They said the virus was widespread among pangolins, based on multiple positive samples; but in fact multiple papers had been written about one batch of smuggled pangolins.) Map-based arguments for the exact site of introduction seem generally like noise to me. Worobey has made aggressive claims in preprints and media interviews, but even his Science paper falls back to just "epicenter", a weaker term without standard epidemiological meaning. SARS-CoV-2 must have been introduced into the Americas at air and seaports; but even with the advance warning to public health officials, that's not where the first clusters were found.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

nomel 3y ago

"Epicenter" does not mean "origin", by any definition of the word. The epicenter is a statistical thing, in this context, not an origin thing. The epicenter of COVID in the US was New York [1]. The origin of COVID was not New York. This is no different than the epicenter being the wet market, but the origin possibly being somewhere else. "Epicenter: the part of the earth's surface directly above the focus of an earthquake" It's all probability of intercept. Density and frequency are important. Relative-to-a-mall probably isn't super useful, in a city with 11 million. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6946a2.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6946a2.htm