Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fomite | Hacker News Reader

This is sort of my reaction.

It's a little like being astonished that a microbe could be identified so quickly in Boston or Atlanta.

My reaction is that the lab should be suspected. They've been doing research on SARS-like viruses from bats for years now. What are the odds that it would break out in the same city, of all the cities in the world? Is the seafood market a scapegoat?

Tons of people have been doing work on SARS-like viruses from bats for years now. That's what happens when you go from "No one gets infected by cornaviruses" to...SARS.

Accidental releases almost always involve people with direct links to the lab in question first. That's a really obvious epidemiological link.

"A coronavirus emerged in China and got detected quickly because of solid medical infrastructure" is a way more parsimonious explanation than "Accidental release from a BSL-4 lab."

> solid medical infrastructure

From what I've read, "solid medical infrastructure" doesn't exist in Wuhan.

Where "solid" = not Liberia or the Congo.

For emerging infectious diseases, Wuhan is perfectly functional, and the Chinese have the necessary resources. Motorbikes with samples aren't getting stuck as roads turn into mud during the rainy season.

How many people commenting on here have actually worked in a lab doing this kind of research? or any lab for that matter? From experience, i will say that researchers are humans too and make mistakes. Things get dropped, spilled, mislablled all the time. Mistakes may be compounded by people collaborating - i.e. researcher A makes mistake at earlier stage in the protocol and researcher B does everything correct but is building on top of that error. Also, people share work spaces where some people are more careful than others.

My first advisor in graduate school was someone working on SARS.

I'm currently an Assistant Professor of Computational Epidemiology, and my research is on healthcare-associated infections and emerging pathogens.

My comment was not a personal attack or even directed at you per se (sorry if it appeared that way). I do still feel that your level of exertise is in the minority of people browsing HN and it is also a valued contribution. I have experience working in labs like this too. I would also say from experience sometimes peoples professors never step a foot in the lab and only direct people from afar and are disconnected from what the troops on the ground are doing. Like any organisation leadership can be disconnected from the day to day or even encourage peverse incentives.

>My reaction is that the lab should be suspected.... What are the odds that it would break out in the same city, of all the cities in the world?

I dunno what are the odds, but do you know what are the odds? If you don't, then you have no base for suspicious.

In this kind of argument odds are just a way of making intuition sound objective. Based on one person's experience it may be obvious that accidental release from labs can happen. To another person this will seem more far fetched.

So which side of the argument should provide evidence? Why is the parents suspicion any less valid than your lack of suspicion? These kind of questions are particularly difficult when secretive government institutions are involved.

If patient zero really came from Wuhan, the law of large numbers would put you at odds around 6/100 (60 million people in Wuhan in the 1 billion people region)

That seems higher than the odds of it being a lab outbreak.

Doesn't every major city the world have some lab testing some kind of virus nearby?

There is only one of these level-4 labs in China and it is in Wuhan...

You also don't need a level 4 lab to work on coronaviruses.

And the outbreak could have, hypothetically, been anything.

Atlanta has the US center for disease control. But your point of just about every other city in the US is accurate

That was the point of picking Atlanta - there's a very high concentration of infectious disease experts with close connections to the major public health agency.

Both Atlanta and Boston have BSL-4 labs.

That's exactly the point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com