New coronavirus can spread between humans, but started in a wildlife market | Hacker News Reader

New coronavirus can spread between humans, but started in a wildlife market

nationalgeographic.com

267 pointsEndXA321 comments

I'm bordering on conspiracy theory territory here, but I'd also like an real investigation into whether the virus actually originated from the Wuhan Biosafety Laboratory. It's the only level 4 (BSL-4 highest rating) lab in all of China designated to handle the most dangerous pathogens. And it's located 20 miles from the reported epicenter in the wildlife market. It was first opened two years ago and at the time multiple scientists worried that the lack of an open culture could lead to potential security problems.

Was there some breach in containment security? Were experimented animals not disposed of properly? We don't know.

There might be nothing here, but it's a hell of a coincidence and if there's some broader security problem, it should be acknowledged and fixed.

Background on the lab: https://www.nature.com/news/inside-the-chinese-lab-poised-to...

> >The former Israeli military intelligence doctor also said suspicions were raised about the Wuhan Institute of Virology when a group of Chinese virologists working in Canada improperly sent samples to China of what he said were some of the deadliest viruses on earth, including the Ebola virus.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/24/virus-hit-w...

Why is Canada sending Ebola to China?

a group of Chinese virologists working in Canada

So the question is what sort of controls are in place vs what sort of controls should be in place. It isn't Canada sending the samples, it's Canada not preventing them from being sent.

By all accounts all procedures were followed, beyond that apparently some intellectual property protections weren't.

China studies major viruses too. They are a party to the research. That part isn't so insidious.

I think it's a perfectly valid question, although the wildlife market is equally valid on the evidence we have. We know that the Chinese Government is hugely overreacting to public information at this point in time - terrible as the published numbers are they are not that out of whack with a normal bad flu epidemic, which also causes significantly higher death rates.

So it's either the actual death rates are higher (well, almost certainly), and/or they know or suspect something more serious.

Bearing in mind too, that even China doesn't trust China on reporting - witness the central committee order a few days ago to the regions to be accurate with reports or else.

We know that the Chinese Government is hugely overreacting

Do we know that? All of the criticism I've seen has been of the government under-reacting. In fact, in a speech yesterday Xi told the local authorities that they weren't doing enough.

Non-Chinese estimates (as of 24 January) are that there's 6,000 people infected vs. 1,300 from the Chinese government.

The 6,000 figure comes from the Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Socio-technical Systems at Northeastern University in Boston: https://www.mobs-lab.org/2019ncov.html

It seems like the local government under-reacted, and now the central government is (hopefully) over-reacting.

It seems like they are reacting too late, and under-reporting.

It seems like they are reacting just in time.

“that even China doesn't trust China on reporting”

Will the federal gov just trust the state gov, especially when the it's a republican president versus a democrat governor? Of course not. That kind of overly abstract wording is what lead to misunderstanding of actual problems.

The odds of this naturally occurring in China are probably close to 1 in 4. And the odds of it happening in Wuhan are probably close to 3%.

The odds of the Chinese government making a super virus based on Coronavirus seem smaller than that, and the odds of it escaping the laboratory might be decent, but when you combine them, it's pretty slim.

If this were some super strain of Smallpox, that would make a more convincing conspiracy.

The odds of there being some plausible conspiracy by now are high.

> The odds of the Chinese government making a super virus based on Coronavirus seem smaller than that, and the odds of it escaping the laboratory might be decent, but when you combine them, it's pretty slim.

I don't think anyone is arguing that this is an outbreak of an unusually dangerous virus. It's just an unexpected outbreak of a new flu-levels-of-dangerous virus, and it happened suspiciously close to a BSL-4 facility. A facility like that stores dangerous viruses and works on them, it's not at all implausible somebody fucked up and something escaped containment.

It’s funny because bats (and bat caves) are reservoirs of many viruses contained in BSL-4 facilities and they have no containment and frequently come into human contact.

I didn't even realize that until now.

>I don't think anyone is arguing that this is an outbreak of an unusually dangerous virus.

It's not unusually dangerous. Viruses kill lots and lots of people every year. This one doesn't seem to be more dangerous than any other. It's just new.

> it happened suspiciously close to a BSL-4 facility

This facility is more likely placed because of opportunity for study in a high risk area. The consumption of random "sweet jungle meat" at the local markets likely has a legacy notoriety for such outbreaks.

I really hope nobody is working on the (insanely irrational) idea of creating a super virus. There's no way in hell you could use that as a weapon of war because there's no way you could ensure it doesn't leave the target country. And even the act of trying to make one is insanely dangerous; if it accidentally gets out, which is easily possible, now you're killing all your own people.

I want to say that all government see the logic of this and haven't so much as attempted it. I don't think China would be this foolish.

There are powers definitely working on it. "Super" just doesn't mean "kills as much people as efficiently as possible". Ability to control the destruction is a crucial feature of any weapon. In the past, this perhaps meant viruses that fizzle out quickly, so they could be deployed on enemy territory. Today, with recent breakthroughs in genetic engineering, that likely means aiming for high selectivity - targeting ethnicity or lineage.

Ultimately, people will be working on it no matter what, because bioweapons are to molecular biology as nuclear weapons are to nuclear physics. A crude and violent application of a field of knowledge of vital, cross-cutting importance to many areas of life.

Do you have a source about people working on it?

Or is this a blacks op kind of thing so no one would admit to it publicly anyway, thus making it an unfalsifiable statement?

I don't have a source per se, just somewhat high level of confidence based on the following (weak, circumstantial) evidence:

- There was a lot of bioweapons R&D done in the XX century[0]; it all seems to have been abandoned between the 70s and the 90s, but since the desire for it is not gone, it would be atypical for humanity if it really all ended;

- Biological sciences keep progressing; each year, developing bioweapons is easier than it was the year before, and since our control over biological systems grow, so (I believe) the allure of a controlled bioweapon.

- You have people like John Sotos - Intel's Chief Medical Officer and a colonel in the Air National Guard - delivering talks like [1], going all serious about the threat of future bioweapons. He seems to think that this is a real danger.

- My general tried and true heuristic that if something is within realms of technological feasibility and promises a clear economic or political benefit, it will be attempted, no matter how horrible it is.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_warfare#List_of_BW_...

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY

This is a good question. The answer is pretty definitive, that yes, this is a thing that superpowers have been confirmed to do in the past. There's much less to go on about current work, but we can look at the type of specialized equipment that is getting built or purchased by various nations and make inferences, and trust that intelligence agencies are making substantiated conclusions. To excerpt from a Congressional Research Service report[0] in 2008:

"No nation publicly acknowledges either an offensive biological weapons (BW) program or stockpile. Examination of unclassified sources indicates that several nations are considered, with varying degrees of certainty, to have some BW capability. These are: China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Syria, and Taiwan."

The most data exists on the Soviet Union. Defectors from the soviet union had a lot to say about Biopreparat.[1] Not all of the rumors have been substantiated, but they did have a number of incidents that strongly suggest they had the souped up versions of several agents defectors claimed they did like anthrax[2], smallpox[3] and marburg[4]. In particular, the smallpox incident[3] that occurred had a high percentage of cases that progressed to the hemorrhagic form which indicates unusual virility in the strain.

There is also evidence of at least ongoing research on those agents. One researcher at vector died in 2004 from pricking herself with a needle filled with Ebola[5]. Whether that's offensive in nature is very difficult to determine. However there's definitely some transparency issues that have increased with time at this facility after a change in leadership in ~2004 or 2005.

[0] http://usiraq.procon.org/sourcefiles/CRS_2-20-08.pdf

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopreparat

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_smallpox_incident

[4] Placeholder. Having a hard time finding where the info on Dr. Ustinov came from. This might be worth a read: https://weaponews.com/history/65348565-strain-u-the-tragedy-...

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/25/world/russian-scientist-d...

Most subject matter experts seem pretty convinced this is happening.

> Lab-made coronavirus related to SARS can infect human cells.

https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debat...

Two of the researchers are from Wuhan Biosafety Lab (Zhengli-Li Shi & Xing-Yi Ge).

"Did China Steal Coronavirus From Canada And Weaponize It?"

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/did-china-steal-coron...

From the article:

"In March 2019 ... a shipment of exceptionally virulent viruses from Canada’s NML ended up in China. The event caused a major scandal with Bio-warfare experts questioning why Canada was sending lethal viruses to China. Scientists from NML said the highly lethal viruses were a potential bio-weapon.

Following investigation, the incident was traced to Chinese agents working at NML. Four months later in July 2019, a group of Chinese virologists were forcibly dispatched from the Canadian National Microbiology Laboratory (NML). The NML is Canada’s only level-4 facility and one of only a few in North America equipped to handle the world’s deadliest diseases, including Ebola, SARS, Coronavirus, etc."

If your population is largely inoculated, which you can do secretly by spiking "flu shots" and having a high %age of cooperation in getting said shots, then you can use those viruses as weapons without threatening your own people.

if some genius decided using mustard gas was a good idea, some "genius" somewhere probably decided using bio-chemical super virus is also a good idea.

Actually scientists are working on super viruses, it's called gain of function.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-08837-7

China has had wet markets since forever basically, how often do outbreaks of this magnitude occur in other such markets in other cities without those kind of labs. If this was a regular occurrence it might not be significant.

Also from Nature (2017):

"Bat cave solves mystery of deadly SARS virus — and suggests new outbreak could occur"

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9

(Wuhan lab apparently carried out the research)

You forget thise one : https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debat...

The original paper is provided by virologists researchers and two of them are from Wuhan Biosafety Lab (Zhengli-Li Shi & Xing-Yi Ge)

This paper claims that their "work suggests a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations," which is opposing the theory that the virus originated from Wuhan Biosafety Laboratory.

>and suggests new outbreak could occur

An outbreak caused _by bats_, which is opposed to GP's theroy.

I dont know how much is conspiracy theory at this point, but it was said that they had small sars outbreak there before.

Take this with a grain of salt, copied from reddit:

Read this website:

http://virological.org/

Specifically this one:

http://virological.org/t/ncovs-relationship-to-bat-coronavir...

and this one:

http://virological.org/t/missed-orfs-in-ncov/345

Basically

Wuhan virus is essentially SARs

http://virological.org/t/missed-orfs-in-ncov/345

"Anyone notice two ‘accessory’ ORFs not annotated in nCoV? Orf13 (aka 9b) (28284:28577) and Orf14 (28734:28955) . One is ~ 70% ID and other ~ 90% to syntenous ORFs in BAT SARS 2017 ?"

Translation:

Some very specific parts of the genome are matching almost exactly, which only occurs in almost identical viruses. The ORFs are tagged parts of genes, this researcher is discussing how Chinese researchers "omitted" parts of their gene annotation. Some back story is the gene sequences have been shared openly so they can be studied, Chinese messed with how they annotated the sequences.

To understand this better, here is the wikipedia definition of 'accessory gene' (ORF is just a chunk of the gene):

"The variable or accessory genome (also: flexible, dispensable genome) refers to genes not present in all strains of a species. These include genes present in two or more strains or even genes unique to a single strain only, for example, genes for strain specific adaptation such as antibiotic resistance."

The researcher is saying specific strain markers are matching between the 2017 virus and this one. Which is impossible, unless...

Not only that, its extremely similar to a SARs taken from bats in 2017! The comment on this linked thread is from a Harvard researcher, she is hinting at a biological link to a lab strain. This virus escaped from Wuhan lab

Another hint from another researcher

The comment on this page from Kristian G. Andersen is mildly disturbing (http://archive.is/O1vhN)... As Associate Professor, Scripps Research, Director of Infectious Disease Genomics, SRTI etc etc I assume he knows what he's talking about when he states: "That means that the outbreak was detected almost immediately after the first case, which - given that this is flu season in China - is just amazing. Detecting an outbreak of pneumonia (similar to flu) of a novel coronavirus that fast is truly impressive."

Basically they are saying its weird to have found this to be a novel virus so fast. Its so uncommon, how could they have done this? Its an oddity

Washington Times article

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/24/virus-hit-w...

UPDATE

More evidence this virus came from a lab!!!!

Read through this Harvard biologists twitter:

https://twitter.com/AndyBiotech/status/1220377043210317831

Specifically:

"Even has almost identical accessory genes to 2018 bat ‘SARS’ (not all in new database annotations)"

Shes saying this virus has already been seen and is logged in a database!

What is this trying to say? It has been clear that the virus is SARS-like since the analysis published by the Shanghai team: http://engine.scichina.com/publisher/scp/journal/SCLS/doi/10...

> I'm bordering on conspiracy theory territory here

Yes.

All of the initial cases are people who have been to a specific seafood market, which also sells wild animals.

You would be suggesting that somehow Biosafety Laboratory dropped it's virus specifically in that market, which sold animals known to naturally carry the coronavirus.

I call bs based on principal: Simple explanation is almost always right over complex ones.

Points of view ... for me the simplest explanation seems to be one linked to the other.

The good news is that we are rational and able to find explanations based on evidence. Let's see what comes out in a few weeks.

"No link with seafood market in first case of China coronavirus, Chinese scientists revealed"

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3047646/no-l...

> Simple explanation is almost always right over complex ones.

What's more likely?

An amazing coincidence:

  - The origin of this novel disease is 20 miles from a research lab.
  - The research lab is actively studying zoonotic viruses.
  - The genome suggests a ~10 years lineage from the closest bat coronavirus (96% identical). This strain of Bat coronavirus has gone under the radar for that long?
  - Despite the numerous mutations it has the exact same envelope protein to that closest bat coronavirus. This is extremely unusual even for closely related viruses.
  - China is 'overreacting': has quarantined 50 million people, stationed armed guards in hazmat suits and is scrambling to build overflow hospitals.

Someone responsible for disposing of test animals (bats) decided instead to make a quick buck selling them to a market 20 miles down the street?

To be fair, it might have been first identified there because there was a lab equipped to isolate it, but I don't really know. I mean, China has had a problem with things like fake eggs, so who knows?

Its DNA seems to have been sequenced and made available online. If it's anything that has obviously been tampered with by a lab, I expect someone to point that out sooner or later. That said, I have no idea what sort of thing could be detected in the first place.

Fake eggs are known to cost more than real eggs. Much like fake meat today. Where do you get that information?

I saw it long ago so I'm not sure, but it was probably from this:

https://www.chinasmack.com/shanghainese-netizen-finds-fake-c...

> Were experimented animals not disposed of properly?

It's not inconceivable that a few of them ended up in the wildlife market. Great way for some low-level person in the lab to make a few bucks, and according to many people I know who have spent time in China the culture of "anything for a few bucks" is even more potent than it is in the USA.

I'm sure Chinese authorities are examining this possibility, but they would never talk about it as it would be embarrassing. If anyone is found to have done this they will be in deep 船尾.

This seems rather unlikely. We have the genome sequence of the Wuhan seafood market coronavirus, and it's consistent with it being a so far unknown relative of the SARS virus and other coronaviruses (see my other comment where I have posted links to the sequence alignments).

So did the Wuhan BSL-4 lab virologists discover a new relative of the SARS virus, study it in their lab, didn't publish it, then accidentally set it free? Sounds substantially less likely to me than people coming in contact with it while handling bush meat. That happens all the time, unfortunately ...

Does that contradict the idea that a similar virus was found and then modifed in the lab?

So...the Wuhan scientists are modifying viruses in their BSL-4 lab (which is no joke when it comes to safety standards) and then just letting these things escape? Sorry, that’s very far fetched. Why can’t people accept that a virus like this could evolve naturally?

Its more likely to be accidentally released like by a worker with stuff on them as has happened previous times with SARs etc in similar viral lab in China ( and happened in other cases and countries including the UK) than intentionally released.

But it's also a hundred times more likely that the source is nature. However we should not discount the possiblity that viruses get out by accident as it's not uncommon even with top bio safety labs.

Define "naturally"

Without human intention: yes.

Without repeated patterns of humans activity: no.

If meat agriculture, and meat-eating in general, were almost nonexistent, the risks of evolving a pandemic would be several orders-of-magnitude lower than exist today.

It has already happened multiple times in the past, four times in Beijing alone: https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/threatened-pandemics-and-lab...

From what I've read it came from bats. Most probably bats being eaten.[1]

Bats have been the source of at least 4 pandemics. It's interesting to note that current coronavirus spreading in China and the SARS outbreak of 2003 have two things in common: Both are from the coronavirus family, and both were passed from animals to humans in a wet market.[2]

I tried to put together a page for coronavirus in China here where I tried to gather all the information in one place in order for us to easily follow stuff (https://thestrife.co/wuhan-coronavirus-media-coverage) and photos[3].

1. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xgqy3n/scientists-now-thi...

2. https://www.businessinsider.in/science/news/experts-think-th...

3. https://thestrife.co/wuhan-coronavirus-gallery

I’ve read virology reports that the virus originated most likely from bats but through an intermediary source — as to which animal, that’s unknown.

Another thing I’ve been pondering is since bats have been the source of deadly, infectious diseases in humans for so long, that’s where the historical myth of vampires and the living dead come from.

There’s plenty of actual research into the ancient origin of vampires you can read without resorting to baseless speculation. There is no single myth or origin and eastern europe has no vampire bats—in fact, the bats are named after the myth. The connection is likely due to them simply being nocturnal.

EDIT: My tone came off as completely dismissing your thinking, which I don't mean to, I just mean to say that there's already a lot written on the topic.

Bat "bites" are only half the story. Bat scratches are really nasty. In ancient times they would look like bites and most always would become infected. Even today, in much of the world (ie usa) any contact with wild bat should be taken very seriously. The link between bats and disease is no myth.

Bats are also the common wild reservoir for lyssaviruses, like rabies. Bats are not highly susceptible to rabies, and can remain asymptomatic for long periods of time. If you wake up in a room with a bat in it, or if you find a bat in a room with a child, or otherwise disabled person, rabies post-exposure prophylaxis is called for, even if you don't find a scratch, or bite mark.

> the virus originated most likely from bats but through an intermediary source

They don't mean another animal. They are hinting at the new Wuhan BSL-4 facility:

https://www.nature.com/news/inside-the-chinese-lab-poised-to...

I've heard the bat eating theory, but the virus is airborne and infects the lungs. So it seems that eating a bat probably didn't cause this.

The act of eating the bat is plausible from people catching them (alive), storied then, preparing them, and people coming to an area where that happens to consume them.

Method of transmission does not stop bats from being a reservoir for the virus.

It was already capable of making the species jump (else it wouldn't), and could have further adapted to using other transmission routes once it got into humans.

The long incubation time makes me think it takes awhile for the virus to get a foothold.

There's plenty of potential transmission routes. For MERS, drinking camel milk, for example, was a pretty strong risk factor.

It is a specific mutation of the virus, that is able to infect lungs and spread by making you sneeze. The mechanism that makes you sick is also the way to spread for the virus. People get viruses all the time from eating bats, but if it doesn't make you sneeze (or spread fluids in another way) it won't be infectious.

It was reported in the BBC today that while SARS originated in bats, the vector for humans were a species of cats that got the disease from the bats.

For coronavirus what we know so far is that it originated in a seafood market, but as to what species was eaten that is speculation at this point.

Comparison between "Bat SARS-like coronavirus" and the "Wuhan seafood market pneumonia virus" seems to show a 100% match:

https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?RID=2PUA1EJK114&CMD...

Bat SARS-like coronavirus WIV1 has been known since at least 2013.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_SARS-like_coronavirus_WIV1

Not at all making light of it, but with the cats and the bats, my mind wanders to David Bowie's apocalyptic "Future Legend": "Fleas the size of rats sucked on rats the size of cats..." The lyrics actually speak to the sort of fear this elicits: "And in the death,/As the last few corpses lay rotting on the slimy/Thoroughfare ... And red, mutant, eyes gaze down on Hunger City."

The vector was civets, which are not cats. See the evolutionary tree here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feliformia#Phylogenetic_tree

Felidae are cats, and Viverridae are civets (closer to hyenas and mongooses).

I've seen at least one report that says the first known patient (who is not necessarily the one who caught the disease from an animal) never visited the Wuhan market.

Despite all the media stating it as fact, it's not certain where it came from yet, just likely.

Not snakes? The first reports I read were about snakes.

Disease passed from bats to snakes to humans: https://www.businessinsider.com/wuhan-coronavirus-sars-bats-...

The Vice article that is cited by sdiw doesn't mention that the virus came from "bats being eaten.[1]" The article does state "new report points to the original animal source: bats" but nothing about bats being eaten. Maybe I missed something, please let me know. :)

The National Geographic article states the following:

> "[T]he highest prevalence of coronaviruses tend to be extruded by animals through feces, or guano in the case of bats. Coronaviruses not only spread via the air and the respiratory tract, but also if fecal matter comes in contact with another creature’s mouth. Bats aren’t exactly clean, so if one nibbles on a fruit, the food may get contaminated with fecal matter. If the fruit drops to the ground, then it can serve as a viral crossover point for farmed animals like civets." [2]

It seems more likely the virus jumped from the bat to another animal that ate something contaminated with bat guano infected with the virus. That animal was then traded at this market where the virus somehow spread to humans.

This lead me to find the following Wikipedia article on Civets[3]. This mentions how Civets are farmed and fed coffee cherries then the partly digested coffee beans are harvested from the Civets fecal matter. This is purely speculation, but this could be one way that the virus could have spread to humans. A Civet ate a coffee cherry that an infected horseshoe bat had contaminated with guano infected with the virus. The Civet was traded at this market and the virus spread to humans. Once again, this is pure speculation on my part but it shows how there are other mechanisms in which the virus could spread to humans without someone 'eating bats'.

[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xgqy3n/scientists-now-thi...

[2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/01/new-coron...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civet#Coffee

Could be even simpler? Someone is going out and killing the bats right? They are physically handling dead bats in bulk, why can’t that be enough?

> Could be even simpler? Someone is going out and killing the bats right? They are physically handling dead bats in bulk, why can’t that be enough?

Because the specific claim was "most probably bats being eaten[1]" (not found in citation). The commenter above took an article which claims that the virus is linked to those found in bats, to "most probably" being caused by bats being eaten.

That is the speculation/claim that is under dispute.

Video of TV Host promoting eating bats. Forced to apologize. https://mobile.twitter.com/pdchinese/status/1221071113645625...

South China Morning Post has an interesting read on wet markets and exotic meat https://www.inkstonenews.com/health/chinas-coronavirus-outbr...

The claim is the virus originated from a wet market where animals like bats sold for food, so it’s not inaccurate to suggest it was transmitted by bats meant for human consumption.

> The claim is the virus originated from a wet market where animals like bats sold for food, so it’s not inaccurate to suggest it was transmitted by bats meant for human consumption.

It absolutely is. You don't have any evidence for this, just speculation. Is it plausible? Sure. Is it "most probably" (as the commenter above suggested, linking to a source)? No, there's no evidence cited that the disease was spread by eating bats in the article.

So yes, it is inaccurate to make a claim, and then cite a source which doesn't make that claim, without making it clear that you're just speculating, and have no actual information to add.

It came from a wet market for exotic meats. If it wasn’t a bat it was some other animal that was illegally trafficked and shouldn’t have been sold for consumption.

> It came from a wet market for exotic meats. If it wasn’t a bat it was some other animal that was illegally trafficked and shouldn’t have been sold for consumption.

And this has what to do about making specific claims without evidence? With passing off sources as supporting your claims when they make no such claim?

That is a fact that has been reported by dozens of news outlets. The market in question has been shut down.

Once again, the claim was:

> From what I've read it came from bats. Most probably bats being eaten.[1]

This claim is not found in

> 1. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xgqy3n/scientists-now-thi...

Simple as that.

There are more news outlets reporting this fact than Vice. I’m commenting on the actual facts not the legitimacy of whatever source OP decided to cite.

Facts in this case can only be reached through consensus of the scientific community. Journalism can only confirm so far as to when who did what, they simply don’t possess the professional knowledge to assert the truthfulness of a scientific theory.

https://time.com/5770904/wuhan-coronavirus-wild-animals/

Several media outlets have confirmed that the "seafood market" actually sells a wide variety of wildlife meat

And a reference pic in Chinese here On this board, it says "Wildfowl Market". They put a price on some meats, including Masked palm civet, which suspected to be the intermediate host of the disease.

https://www.6parknews.com/newspark/view.php?app=news&act=vie...

> Several media outlets have confirmed that the "seafood market" actually sells a wide variety of wildlife meat

I'm sorry, but as I've said numerous times, the specific claim that I was disputing was that the commenter above claimed that they had an article stating that bat consumption was the "most probable". In fact, the article you linked specifically says what I'm saying. Namely, don't speculate!

> The West Blames the Wuhan Coronavirus on China’s Love of Eating Wild Animals. The Truth Is More Complex

Wonder what this could mean?

> The 2002-2003 SARS pandemic was eventually traced to civet cats sold in a similar style of wet market in southern Guandong province, and some foreign tabloids are circulating unsubstantiated claims that the Wuhan coronavirus originated from everything from bat soup to eating rats and live wolf pups.

This certainly doesn't sound like Time magazine is speculating that bat consumption is the "most probable" cause to me.

> However, Adam Kamradt-Scott, associate professor specializing in global health security at the University of Sydney, says this way of thinking is often flawed. While scientists first thought that Ebola started with the consumption of bat meat in a village of south-eastern Guinea, they now believe that the two-year-old girl known as Child Zero was likely infected via bat droppings that contaminated an object she put in her mouth. MERS was also primarily spread from live camels to humans through association, rather than the eating of camel meat.

This, rather, seems to support my claim that we shouldn't speculate on things that we don't have any information or expertise about.

It's been reported that there are tv shows in China where bats are eaten [1] Not a great source but it links to official China Gov sources.

[1] https://www.zerohedge.com/health/chinese-government-forces-t...

Zero Hedge is not a reliable source, especially not for anything concerning foreigners or foreign countries.

Does official information relayed through somewhat unreliable sources invalidate the quality of said information?

I did not see any links to any official government documents on that page. Indeed, I saw very little attribution for many claims. The article is fraught with cultural bias against China, and additionally, I noticed multiple misleading remarks.

Starting from the title. The “TV show” the article refers to was actually just an internet video post. Additionally, this was a one-off event from 2016, and it caused outrage and she was forced to publicly apologize[1]. In many places, the Zerohedge author implies it is a current event, stating:

> The video shows the woman breaking apart the corpse of a boiled bat, dipping its wing in sauce and eating it.

> Meanwhile, the scale of the coronavirus outbreak continues to escalate.

This is clearly misleading. Additionally, the description of the bat’s “corpse” is reminiscent of PETA writing about meat farms. I suspect this writing style only appears when the author is projecting a bias.

Next, the first photo featuring a girl holding a bat has a Chinese caption. Below this Chinese caption is an English caption, somewhat loosely implying a translation. This English caption mentions eating bats as a commonplace event in China. Not only is this fact itself debatable, but it does not translate any part of the Chinese caption, which roughly says “As the Coronavirus news spreads, the news about bats containing lots of viruses is once again garnering attention.”

Next, there is a lengthy Chinese tweet quoted. The English of the article does not reference the content of this tweet a single time, instead appearing to imply that it supports whatever claims he is making and assuming the reader will not understand the tweet. The tweet itself says that, loosely, research has found that bats could be the source of the coronavirus and this older bat eating video is once again making the social media rounds, prompting another public apology from the woman in the video. The article says, directly preceding the quote: > The woman featured in the clip took to social media to profusely apologize for her role in encouraging the consumption of bats and encouraged everyone to start washing their hands more.

Indeed tangential, but not related.

Essentially every claim in the article is unsourced and largely unsubstantiated, and it paints the Chinese in a very negative light, with many heavily prejudiced and vulgar portrayals of China and Chinese food. So, in this case, yes this article is invalid.

On top of all of this, you took the invalid claim that a tv show featured a bat being eaten and turned it into “bats are eaten on tv, commonly”. This is disingenuous on your part, on top of an already disingenuous source.

[1] remember when Ozzy ate a bat’s head on stage?

I appreciate you taking time to respond to the article - which is indeed rubbish.

However, I would think it fairly uncontroversial, and readily provable, that bat meat is indeed eaten in China [1]- which is the claim that I was making earlier. Personally, I wouldn't claim at this point in time that the virus originated from bats or other animals - although it is certainly possible.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=bat+soup+delicacy+china&sour...

So to

> It absolutely is. You don't have any evidence for this, just speculation. Is it plausible? Sure. Is it "most probably" (as the commenter above suggested, linking to a source)? No, there's no evidence cited that the disease was spread by eating bats in the article.

You replied

> It's been reported that there are tv shows in China where bats are eaten [1] Not a great source but it links to official China Gov sources.

But later stated

> However, I would think it fairly uncontroversial, and readily provable, that bat meat is indeed eaten in China [1]- which is the claim that I was making earlier.

Effectively, what you've said then was entirely a non-sequitur to what I was discussing, which was the specific claim about whether or not there is enough evidence (presented here, anyway) to claim that bat consumption is the "most probable" cause of the disease, or even if consumption at all will be linked to the disease (rather than proximity/hygiene).

In fact, you later stated that you agree with my point.

> Personally, I wouldn't claim at this point in time that the virus originated from bats or other animals - although it is certainly possible.

This claim is invalid. See my response here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22151968

It looks like it's really too early to tell and so far it looks like initial reports of it having a nexus in the market were premature. It's still uncertain where the first patients got it from. Originally Wuhan gov was saying their first patients were on Dec 27, but that's being revised to Dec 1. So it seems given the disparity in dates the assertion of the epidemic having started in the market is unconfirmed at this time and Is more the result of speculation (or misinformation).

Local news said it is eating bamboo rat.

Isn't the very fact people eat bats alarming? Who would eat bats voluntarily? They probably don't have much choice there.

The same could be said for plenty of meats, e.g. lobster ("who would eat these bottom-feeding saltwater cockroaches voluntarily?"). Different cultures can simply have different norms, and even where it's not normal, poor people will eat whatever is available and rich people will eat whatever is a curiosity.

In Asia people eat a lot of really weird stuff for us Westerners. I live in Thailand with my Thai girlfriend.

I don't understand why my girlfriend likes to eat various kinds of insects and larva and why people in my village like to eat a pigs' brains. Yesterday my girlfriend showed me a YouTube movie of a Chinese girl eating a live octopus. I also know some people like to eat snakes around here.

Different strokes for different folks and all that.

There's a ragout made from lungs (Beuschel) that is enjoyed in the former Austro-Hungarian empire area and absolutely nowhere else. If you want to try it, the best can be had at the Meierei, just don't forget to reserve a seat a few weeks ahead especially if your lunch aligns with the strudel time, the place is packed to the gills then.

> that is enjoyed in the former Austro-Hungarian empire area and absolutely nowhere else

Nonsense, that's Austrian exceptionalism at its worst. All across Europe the dish (English speaking locales: "calf's lights") can be had in a minority of restaurants and also is occasionally cooked at home.

You live in a Thai village? How do the costs compare to living in a larger city?

Thai food and drinks like coffee can be a bit cheaper for sure. Most dishes can be bought on the local markets or in local "restaurants" for 40 Baht or so. Smaller coffeeshops also offer drinks for around 40 Baht. I believe in bigger cities prices might be 50% higher or so.

Clothes and such can be had very cheap as well (maybe 200 Baht for jeans), but no brands of course.

For reference: 1 USD is around 30 Baht right now.

Can confirm. Many dishes around Bangkok have been raised to around 50฿ now and I'd say your average 'indie' coffee shop with AC, wifi, and power outlets, drinks will be about 60-80฿.

Rent for a studio outside the city centers of Bangkok with AC and a hot shower (rare since locals don't like hot showers) is like 4000-8000฿ / mo.

Eating a live octopus is a horrible practise. But seeing people reacting to it with distaste just because it is "yucky" makes me really sad. These animals are highly intelligent, many of them on par with dogs, and most surely capable of suffering as much as a dog would suffer, if it was being eaten alive.

The only creatures I'd ever consider eating alive are insects. I've stopped eating squid altogether.

Eating brains is dangerous - there is a risk of a prion infection.

You might like this:

https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

https://i.imgur.com/FUwsbBM.png

I think you might be confused about "bats being eaten". A theory on SARS is that it was spread by bats eating fruit, leaving guano on it, civets eat the guano-laced fruit, people eat the civets. Just because bats are an important part of the vector doesn't mean that people are eating them directly. I haven't seen anyone claim, for example, that live bats were actually sold at the Wuhan wet markets. But civets are, illegally.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7927747/Asian-man-d...

The daily mail is not a reliable source. Especially not for anything involving foreigners.

Perhaps, but nevertheless the CCP gov had a media star apologize for “popularizing” eating bat soup.

Here’s the research claiming that SARS jumped from horseshoe bats to civets to humans:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1236580/

How common is for SARS coronaviruses to share the same envelope proteins? I downloaded 200 CoV envelope proteins from NCBI, and I couldn't find any pair of identical proteins. As someone unfamiliar with virology, I'm curious if there are any explanations for how come the protein envelope of 2019-nCoV[1] is the same as the protein envelope described by the Institute of Military Medicine Nanjing Command 2 years ago in the unpublished paper "Genomic characterization and infectivity of a novel SARS-like coronavirus in Chinese bats"[3]? Is it just a coincidence? The bats used in the paper were from Zhejiang not Hubei.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/protein/YP_009724392.1

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/protein/AVP78033.1

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6135831/

Some additional information: this paper cites the unpublished paper you mention ("Genomic characterization and infectivity of a novel SARS-like coronavirus in Chinese bats"): https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

With regard to ZC45, which your paper discusses, it states:

> The genome of our virus strains are phylogenetically closest to the bat SARS-related coronaviruses first found in the Chinese horseshoe bats, Rhinolophus sinicus, captured in Zhoushan, Zhejiang province, China, between 2015 and 2017. The full virus genome had about an 89% nucleotide identity with bat-SL-CoVZC45, which makes it a new species. Moreover, the Spike protein of our virus has an 84% nucleotide identity with the bat-SL-CoVZC45 coronavirus and an 78% nucleotide identity with the human SARS coronavirus.

Doesn't answer your question as to how common this is, but provides some additional context on the extent of similarities.

Quick update: after analyzing about 3,500 strains of coronaviruses, I found several that shared the same envelope proteins despite being different strains e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ipg/?term=ABP38309.1 My quick-and-dirty estimate from my data is that about 0.1% share the same envelope protein with other viruses, but this was just rushed amateur work, so don't take the number too seriously.

Comparison between "Bat SARS-like coronavirus" and the "Wuhan seafood market pneumonia virus" seems to show a 100% match:

https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?RID=2PUA1EJK114&CMD...

Bat SARS-like coronavirus WIV1 has been known since at least 2013.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_SARS-like_coronavirus_WIV1

Yes, these are the two strains I was referring to in my original post. They share the same sequence of 75 aminoacids for their envelope proteins despite differing slightly in the nucleotide sequences.

It's almost certainly a coincidence. Bats don't have an inflammatory response to viral infections like other mammals [1] so viruses are basically harmless to them and they are perfect carriers, with many species having life expectancies reaching 2-3 decades. Studies of regional populations of bats have found that if a virus makes it into a bat population, it will usually spread to 50-90% of the total population (where virus = rabies and region = Western Europe) [2]. This Wuhan virus evolving from another SARS-like virus while maintaining surface markers is squarely in the realm of possibility.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6410205/

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1539106/

Key quote from the article:

> “If we were to shut the wildlife markets, a lot of these outbreaks would be a thing of the past,” says Ian Lipkin, director of Columbia University’s Center for Infection and Immunity, whose lab worked with Chinese officials to develop early diagnostic tests for SARS.

> That’s because both SARS and the new outbreak are zoonotic, meaning these diseases started in animals before spreading to humans. Zoonotic diseases rank among the world’s most infamous. HIV, Ebola, and H5N1 influenza, for example, all percolated in wildlife before close interactions with humans spawned international outbreaks. With SARS, food preparers and people who handled, killed, and sold wild animals made up nearly 40 percent of the first cases. The earliest episodes were also among people who were more likely to live within walking distance of wildlife markets.

> The earliest episodes were also among people who were more likely to live within walking distance of wildlife markets.

Also, the distance from the Wuhan wildlife market to the high-speed rail station is walking distance.

Nat Geo is making a lot of assumptions here based on official Chinese info. There is also a world class virology research center in Wuhan that opened in the last few years that was studying viruses just like this. I don't think it's a coincidence it broke out in Wuhan, as there are wildlife markets in other cities in China too.

Maybe (hopefully?) China will shut down these markets after this outbreak. They've been known to take serious measures in the past when necessary. Surely the benefit of these markets cannot outweigh their costs (including on the local wildlife, not just infectious diseases).

Won’t that just drive it underground? Then nobody would even know where it started when the next outbreak happens.

Don't underestimate how effectively a totalitarian and surveillance state like China can be in discouraging behaviors they don't want. People aren't willing to risk their lives just to eat exotic animals. And that could be what's at stake here; witness what happened to some of the people involved in the melamine baby milk formula scandal.

Seems like they are already risking their lives eating exotic animals.

Thinking that the wild animals are more healthy

You can drive it underground because, I think, the problem is coming from having too many animals/people in a small crowded place. If people were to raise their own cattle it'd be much healthier[-].

- Not really an expert, might be wrong.

That's a very western-centric view of things. I'm assuming trying to draw parallels from happened when the US tried alcohol prohibition, which failed partially due to government greed. These things can be effective in other cultures, especially when people believe in the cause (e.g. see how quickly and efficiently alcohol consumption practically ceased overnight in Islamic history).

It is because of the wealth disparity. A massive chunk of the population lives in absolute poverty. I don't see them fixing that anytime soon.

Maybe they could take some of the wealth some Chinese have accumulated and give it to the poor and needy, but that's probably just communist crazy talk from me.

Edit: typos

> massive chunk of the population lives in absolute poverty

30 years ago yes, but not anymore.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.DDAY?locations=C...

Also, the rural folks living in poverty are not the ones buying exotic animals in a big city like Wuhan. Although they may well be at the start of the supply chain, catching it for the well-heeled city folks treating guests to exotic banquets.

I've been told by friends in China that modern cities like Beijing shut down these markets years ago. It's still a holdover from the huge migration from rural to urban environments, and a cultural preference for eating wild meats, more so than a cost of living issue.

Wuhan is a modern city.

I've never been to Beijing but I have visited two of the other tier one cities and I can assure you wet markets still exist there.

In places like Singapore (Chinese dominant culture, but different government), wet markets exist, but they don't sell unregulated wild meat.

I gather the one in Wuhan wasn't supposed to either, but either enforcement was lacking or they were paid to look the other way.

How much unregulated wild meat is there in the city-state of Singapore to begin with?

Close to none.

Recent and relevant interview from All Things Considered (NPR):

https://www.npr.org/2020/01/22/798644707/why-wet-markets-per...

One interesting point was they had tried to discourage these markets in the past and replace them with supermarkets, but people didn't want to switch. These markets offered food cheaper, people like them, they might offer opportunities to socialize, and they offer wild animals which are traditionally viewed as healthy and a sign of wealth.

Of course, the Chinese government can do a more authoritarian crackdown on it than what they tried in the past. Also, maybe this outbreak could change public opinion.

President Xi has warned that the virus is spreading. His intervention seems to be unprecedented. Is it worse than what it seems to be?

They have quarantined whole cities and are building a hospital at war scale especially for this.

Maybe the Chinese know something that the world doesn't know yet.

So far the virus is believed to have a two week incubation period with unknown transmissability during that time, which makes it particularly hard to contain, especially with a migration like Chinese New Year.

The lockdown is unprecedented in China but the Soviet Union used to do similar lockdowns (at a smaller scale) during cholera outbreaks. I think this is just a massive overcorrection due to China's 2003 SARS outbreak but we'll start seeing more and more of these large scale quarantines as our civilization comes to terms with the realities of cheap air travel.

In 1963 during last outbreak of smallpox epidemic in Europe Wroclaw in Poland had been quarantined for 47 days.

[] https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/6nhzqd/54_years_ago...

Correction - 1972 Yugoslav smallpox outbreak was the last in Europe

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Yugoslav_smallpox_outbrea...

Actually it was in the UK. This was also (hopefully) the last death ever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_smallpox_outbreak_in_the_...

They had to deal with SARS and are trying a more aggressive approach this time.

It's clear that there are many infected people who have not been confirmed, possibly on the scale of 100,000. Most will probably show mild to moderate symptoms but expect total deaths to rise into four figures.

Anecdotal (not official) reports suggest as many as 100,000 infections in Wuhan area. There are claims the virus may be spread through eyes as well as inhalation. Additional unsubstantiated claims suggest low to no fever during incubation period, making detection difficult. The most sensationalist claim making the rounds is that a known Wuhan area PLA biolab may have failed to contain this pathogen.

In the end none of the above matters at all. What matters is the willingness globally to take political and economic action to contain transmission. The World Health Organization's failure to declare this a global emergency is risky if the characteristics stated above turn out to be accurate. Timing is key.

Is transmission through eyes that odd?

The common cold already is. You rub your eyes, the virus enters your tears, which drain to your nose.

Yeah, the "this one spreads through eyes!!!!!!!" shit I keep seeing pop up is actually helping to moderate my panic, somewhat.

It reminds me how much of the "panic!" signal I've been really starting to see explode in the last ~24h, which humans are highly sympathetically attuned to when they suddenly see it spreading everywhere around them, is just from a sheer mass of other idiots who actually don't know anything either coming online on the issue, and reflects internet meme virality, and only very indirectly the uptick in actual danger (ie, from having been loosely following the outbreak, prior to this latest popularization).

Still looks pretty fucking bad, though.

It matters because face masks are not enough to prevent transmission, which matters relative to the common cold only because this virus kills. The common cold does not.

But this is taken care of by face marks and hand washing, because what would be happening is you touch your eyes.

If you're using a face mask, you should be washing your hands anyway, because if you think it's working, the moment you touch it you've come in contact with virus.

Indeed. In addition, the best thing you can do beyond hand washing is don’t touch your face.

Hard to do, I know, but it eliminates a major source of transmission.

how long can a virus live on a face mask?

For an enveloped virus like this? "Awhile". I'm sure there's estimates for SARS or Influenza somewhere that are probably pretty correct for this too.

No, it isn't odd at all.

What do you mean anecdotal? I'm really confused at how you even came up with that number. Unless you have some type of firsthand experience.

A few experts in the field have tweeted this speculation.

So what you are saying the mortality rate is comparable to the flu at those infection rates. Why the panic

No, because there are also many social media reports that patients dying of "viral pneumonia" are not being attributed to Coronavirus - simply due to the overwhelming of medical professionals and the inability to sequence everyone's samples.

They aren't spending time confirming that dead patients had coronavirus when they are in crisis mode.

"In the end none of the above matters at all."

It matters critically if China, or anyone else, is in any way lying about anything.

Official reports are 2K infected, if it's actually 100K and they are not telling the WHO, it's really, really bad.

What the 'put on the news' is another matter and gray area concerning information control in crisis times (i.e. trying to stop mass panic). But with the WHO and other governments, it's another story.

It's not like they can entirely hide these things, I really wonder what kind of other 'interested parties' are making their own clandestine measurements.

I would be more concerned if the ones that are outside of China were dying at high rates. So far I haven’t heard any of those quarantined people actually dying. The ones in the US have been listed in fair condition and recovering.

The deaths are mostly among older ages, 60s, 70s, 80s. This group is probably less likely to be traveling.

But does that matter when young infected people are traveling.

Dying at a high rate doesn’t matter if they do so quickly. That’s why Ebola has failed to become a global pandemic: it’s too potent and kills hosts before they have a chance to infect enough others.

Ebola is also not airborne it’s spread by bodily fluids. You can’t get it from someone coughing. People flew on planes infected with Ebola and didn’t spread it. It was overhyped by the media. In 1st world nations, it had no means to really spread like cholera.

Ebola was also contained because of tremendous effort of many people, often risking their own lives. Thanks to them you now have the luxury to call it overhyped.

General consensus so far seems to be about twice as fatal as the annual flu. (Which says nothing about transmissibility rate / R0, which they are still figuring out.) Really rough numbers, annual flu is around 0.1% , while the spanish flu was more like 2.5%

So, not a pandemic in terms of fatality. General sense so far seems to be it's more of a big deal than the (run-of-the-mill) flu, less of a big deal than SARS. (Keep in mind that the run-of-the-mill flu is kind of a big deal.)

Care to quote a source for "twice as fatal as the flu"? Everything indicates it's way worse.

6 of the first 41 identified patients have died. That's a mortality rate of 15%. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... Caveat: 41 is a very small sample, and the first patients are likely to have been the most severe cases (pre-existing conditions, weak immune systems, etc).

And when you take publicly reported statistics, 42 deaths out of 1441 confirmed cases, that's a mortality rate of 2.9%. But the confirmed cases are probably under-reported (but so are deaths)...

15% or 2.9% are 150-30 times worse than the flu mortality rate.

Need better data to get better mortality rate. Stop hyperbole, let the epidemiologists call it.

Of course, we need better data. But tunesmith was downplaying numbers with unsourced claims, so he needed to be corrected.

The latest stats: 54 deaths out of 1764 cases → 3.1% mortality rate https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/01/the-latest-coronavirus...

All things considered, it's highly likely that there are more unreported cases than unreported deaths, which means that the actual mortality rate is lower.

What we need is stats on cured vs died for confirmed cases, but I haven't seen recent figures on that for a while, plus there's an inevitable delay on declaring somebody cured.

«it's highly likely that there are more unreported cases than unreported deaths, which means that the actual mortality rate is lower.»

I don't think so, because deaths lag infections. When the outbreak is rapidly growing, if it takes about 5 days for the virus to kill, then even if you knew all the stats perfectly, you actually need to look at the ratio of "deaths as of day D" over "infections as of D-5" to calculate the mortality rate. If you do this math right now (291 infections as of Jan 20, 56 deaths as of Jan 25) you find the mortality rate is 19%. Assuming infections are underreported by a factor of 5, the mortality rate is still high at 19/5 = 3.8%.

This is highly speculative. What if the under reporting is 10% &c. It's just an exercise in arithmetic, we're going to have to wait for more data.

Because the 1441 confirmed cases are likely to be far lower than the number of people who actually have it. Carriers, latency, people recovering on their own. This ratio is the number that will get much more accurate over the next couple of weeks.

There are far more confirmed cases now, by the way. That number has almost doubled in the last two days.

https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

Mortality rate is compared against recoveries, not confirmed cases. Your figure is wrong.

The spanish flu killed way more than that, at least according to wikipedia. Something like 10-20%. It was a monumental event that killed a percentage of the entire global population. The kind of thing you can only call a true plague. Think like the black plague, where a substantial percentage of some populations where wiped off the face of the earn. Imagine 1/3 or 1/2 of your community dying.

I keep seeing this 2.5% number, and I don't understand what people are talking about.

You're right - it's strange, this article seems to contradict itself within one paragraph. 500 million afflicted, 50 - 100 million deaths, at least it says ">" 2.5% fatality.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3291398/

My guess is, this is done because of Chunjie. For Chinese New year, people usually travel home to visit relatives. If the Chinese government wants to limit that, they need a very good reason, otherwise people will freak. So they have to exaggerate the danger, in order to be able to keep social peace when they quarantine cities.

I have a friend who teaches in China and according to him everyone is extremely worried. People aren't going out, wearing masks when they do, and so forth.

For what it's worth I'm flying back home to the US from the UAE and at the airport as I was waiting to check my bag I saw many (10+) groups of Chinese tourists checking entire boxes of 3M N95 masks. My guess is that they're running out at home and these tourists saw an opportunity to make some money or help people out (or both).

Can an N95 mask prevent viral infection? Those things are typically for particulates and are charged so things like dust attach to the fibers. I’m not sure they’re effective for aerosolized particles

I did research this topic many years ago during the bird flu panic, and the short answer is yes, a PROPERLY USED N95 mask prevents infection. The properly used part is quite tricky though, for example you touch the outside of the mask with your fingers when you remove it, and then rub your eyes... There's a reason those guys are in a full suit and not just a mask.

But even if it's not 100% effective, even if it's just 90% it's still a massive win.

There's very little evidence N95 masks work better than surgical masks, which are cheaper and easier to use.

Umm, properly used N95 masks have been shown to filter particles <10 nm...

And repeated studies have failed to show that N95 masks reduce transmission more than surgical masks do.

One of many studies: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4868605/

N95 masks are better when there's dust, or smog, but don't make preventing getting sick any better than surgical masks. The idea behind surgical masks is to prevent you from getting sick when people sneeze, cough, etc. So the effectiveness is basically the same providing you use them properly.

Never touch the front of the mask. Wash your hands after removing. Dispose of mask after use.

- Wearing masks is normal because of air pollution. A lot of people wear really loose non-N95/n99 masks though, but there's definitely an uptick in people wearing better masks because of the virus.

- An acquantince of mine went to a supermarket today. Everything seems fine (they live not too far from Beijing where there are confirmed cases).

- There are still people entering Wuhan to see family. (https://youtu.be/cmgPVhubmQA?t=208)

I'm not saying people don't care. My family is worried for me because I left Hanoi the same day an infected individual arrived in Hanoi. I have friends that are worried for their families back home. But I still see a lot of friends celebrating the new year, albeit not in any quarantined areas.

There's reports of people leaving the quarantined areas with symptoms. I wish they would team up with Tencent to flag individuals who have been active in the quarantined regions and left such regions since then.

> An acquantince of mine went to a supermarket today. Everything seems fine

What would it look like if it wasn't fine...?

Massive shortages from people mass panic buying?

Masks are sold out the couple of places I've been to in Beijing. Girlfriend's family cancelled CNY celebrations for fear of the virus.

People are taking it very seriously.

In Shanghai (at least, Pudong and Puxi), mask usage has jumped dramatically since last week. I haven't actually kept score, but my impressions of usage from walking around a lot are:

- Summer/spring (lower pollution — Chinese AQI around 60–100, with spikes to 150): 5-10% of people wear masks outdoors. The indoor rate is lower (2-3%?).

- December/early January (AQI typically above 120): 20-30% outdoors. The indoor rate is much lower.

- As of January 23/24: 80-90% outdoors. The indoor rate is at least as high. This time period includes a couple of anomalously low-pollution days (AQI 30 — the lowest I've ever seen in Shanghai), when I might otherwise expect mask usage to be even lower than that 20–30% from before the Wuhan events escalated.

This is just people walking around and shopping. As of a few days ago, some businesses, such as Starbucks and Didi (Chinese Uber/Lyft), require employees to wear respirators (and they've messaged to customers on WeChat and in the Chinese Starbucks and Didi apps).

This is consistent with my observations in the Jiading area - low pollution days but mask usage around 80% for general populace and 95% for service workers (store clerks, etc).

We’ve decided to leave China before things get any worse. I’m not looking forward to bringing my family through the airport this week though...

Good luck and safe travels!

They built a 1,000 bed isolation hospital for SARS too, near Beijing. Also in a week. It was demolished about ten years ago.

Here is a map I made of the spread yesterday (only). https://github.com/globalcitizen/2019-wuhan-coronavirus-data...

While making it, I was watching the numbers quite closely. An observation I made is that the official statistics were ~900 officially confirmed cases on the 24th evening, ~1200 officially confirmed cases 25th (morning), yet only 1300 officially confirmed cases on the 25th (evening). Why ~50% jump then nothing? All previous figures had followed this hyperbolic path.

A few possible reasons (conjecture): overwhelmed doctors, possible low level bureaucratic pressures not to report or admit new cases, people dying at home, undiagnosed infections, geographic spread and Chinese New Year resulting in slower diagnosis.

All we can really take from this is that clearly the official statistics are only part of the story. In terms of the speed of the domestic geographic spread, it is horrifying. The cat is truly out of the bag.

It jumped to 1900 again in the morning. That is just a reporting pipeline delay I think. Not diverging from "hyperbolic growth" as far as I can tell.

Can someone explain https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?RID=2PUA1EJK114&CMD... to me?

This is a comparison between 'bat SARS-like coronavirus' and 'Wuhan seafood market pneumonia virus'. Under Alignments, it looks like the envelope proteins are identical. Wouldn't that be unlikely for a natural mutation? Would this not lead credence to this being a leak from their BSL-4 lab about twenty miles away from the Wuhan seafood market?

Thanks!

I have no credibility to answer this question, and I don't even know what any of the words on that page mean, but is it possible that it was always the same virus and just documented under two different names? After all, pneumonia is a symptom of coronavirus, so wouldn't it make sense that people thought it was just the "Wuhan seafood market pneumonia virus" until later reports and information indicated it would actually be a "bat SARS-like coronavirus"?

Nope, not a chance! The news of it being properly isolated, sequenced and placed in a tree directly under bat SARS-like coronavirus that shows they are considered separate:

https://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2020/01/13/novel-coron...

Another MAJOR key difference here: One is not transmissible to humans and the other is.

There's no way that professional virologists are mistaking/conflating a pneumonia and a coronavirus.

Pneumonia is just an infection of the lungs, and that can be caused by many things, including aspiration. So by your logic, all things that cause headaches are actually the same virus because they all cause headaches.

> Pneumonia is just an infection of the lungs

Actually that’s not true either, you can catch pneumonia from breathing the wrong chemicals. Pneumonia is an inflammation of the lungs, which is frequently caused by infection.

Yes. There’s a biology from Harvard who has noticed this. I think people are catching on it’s from the lab. I’ve seen PhD level biologists on twitter making the same observations

Here it is:

Wuhan virus is essentially SARs http://virological.org/t/missed-orfs-in-ncov/345 "Anyone notice two ‘accessory’ ORFs not annotated in nCoV? Orf13 (aka 9b) (28284:28577) and Orf14 (28734:28955) . One is ~ 70% ID and other ~ 90% to syntenous ORFs in BAT SARS 2017 ?"

This was a lab break.

Thank you, exactly the informed reply I was hoping for. Now let's hope the rest of HN sees this buried half-way down the thread.

For non-biologists among us ORF = open reading frame. It has roughly the same meaning as a gene.

>This was a lab break.

Or, the lab happened to be studying a similar virus that existed in local bats?

Here's the alignment between the complete nucleotide sequences for "bat SARS-like coronavirus" and the "Wuhan seafood market pneumonia virus": https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?CMD=Get&RID=2T49U0F...

As you can see, they are highly related (88.7% identity), but there are point mutations all over the place. The envelope protein is very short, and given this rate of mutations it is not unlikely to find an identical stretch of this length, particularly if the coding sequence is under selective pressure. In fact, the nucleotide sequences for the envelope protein differ in 3 silent point mutations (you can go to alignment view, the sequence starts with "ATGATGAACCGAC" and ends with "TGGTCTAA", total length is 228 nucleotides.)

So no, this is not evidence of this being artificially generated, just that they're highly related.

Edit: To put this in perspective, the original SARS virus from 2003 is 84.9% identical to the "bat SARS-like coronavirus" (https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?CMD=Get&RID=2T5DXWU...) and 82.3% identical to the Wuhan seafood market virus (https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?CMD=Get&RID=2T5GRS8...).

That is my worry. Not expert but is it confirmed ？

> https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?RID=2PUA1EJK114&CMD...

This link is no longer working ("Error: Results for RID 2PUA1EJK114 not found", at least for me), mirror: http://archive.md/zyYYY

I saw this map on Reddit today, and I’m probably going to add to ignorant hysteria:

https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

I just can’t believe the real number of infected is as low as the reported confirmed number based on that map. It’s got to be all of over China if the confirmed cases are all over like that (not to mention it made to NA and Europe).

I'm amazed that there's not a movement to stop eating and being around animals as much world-wide, given that so much disease (and environmental damage) comes from consumption of and proximity to animals:

- MERS-CoV: bats via dromedary camels

- nCoV-2019: bats or snakes?

- Influenza: pigs, birds

- E. coli O157:H7: cows and other farm animals.

...

(Edit: I mean along the lines of how safer sex is encouraged to prevent STDs, hand washing is encouraged to prevent food-borne illnesses, ... I haven't seen a call for the above.)

There is a movement against industrial livestock production.

The worst thing you can do to the human immune system is to cease to expose it to pathogens.

It's not a dichotomy - removing animals from our diet does not leave a sterile environment for humans. Humans and their environment are plenty filthy on their own.

Then this is purely a vegan argument unrelated to the virus.

Again, not a dichotomy. Humans will remain exposed to pathogens even if we eliminate one source of new and dangerous ones.

And the second worse thing is to expose it to completely novel viruses. How about we expose it to as many common viruses as we want, but try to prevent novel viruses from popping up?

Clearly this is bullshit since exposing it to a sufficient load of HIV fucks it up proper. So we have an existence proof of at least one thing worse than "ceasing to expose it to pathogens".

Bats carry many viruses but are asymptomatic. Pigs can contract viruses from other animals, they mutate and then it's passed on to humans. A bat biting a pig is probably the cause of many weird viruses.

You also have to wonder if the African Swine flu running rampant through China is also part of the cause.

> wonder if the African Swine flu running rampant through China is also part of the cause

You mean as in it having transformed and evolved from the swine flu?

The ASF and the 2019-nCoV viruses are not related at all.

I guess it's actually called African Swine Fever aka Swine Flu.

If pigs can be incubators of human and non-human viruses and ASF being rampant did it and whatever bat virus or seafood virus get together in a pig and create 2019-nCoV.

Actually, I see a much greater risk being around other humans. It’s why I don’t live near a major city and work from home. There is a chance that a virus from an animal might mutate to be human communicable but literally every virus from a human is already human communicable. People see it as somehow natural to live in a city of millions of people and then we are viewing animals as the greatest threat?

You genuinely chose where to live on the basis that living in remote proximity to other humans could perhaps lower your chance of catching an illness from them?

There are other reasons I’ve moved here but that did play into why I moved my family away from cities. I don’t think it’s safe living near too many people. I prefer to know everyone I interact with in my life. That and I cannot stand the sound of traffic constantly. Additionally, there is more chance of dying in a car accident or in some sort of crime. Plus if there is a war, major cities will be the first targets. People who cluster together tend to assume everything is just going to work out and don’t think about possibilities of what could happen.

I mean, we're talking for the most part about cases where people were having sustained contact with infected animals in wet market-type situations. It's not obvious to me that the problem is animal consumption in general, or if the issue is the prevalence of wet markets in SE Asia. And in any case, if there's a group of people who you're going to have trouble convincing to move away from animal consumption, folks who work in the animal industry are probably going to be the last ones to switch.

E. Coli is also scary, but it doesn't spread as readily person to person, so it's not something that's going to move the needle for most people.

Lets not forget ebola

Basically all human diseases started out as zoonosis as humans for a long time we’re too few to be a viable reservoir.

The worst part is how the diseases from other animals are way too deadly to humans. The human-specific diseases like the common cold are a great example of a disease that is ideally adapted to its host. Its high adaptable (thus getting around our immune system), it spreads effectively, and crucially, it's very rarely fatal. Because it's not deadly, it can easily infect the same host over a hundred times throughout its lifetime.

Viruses that are routinely deadly to the organisms catching them are not adapted well to their hosts. We see this with HIV (came from monkeys), the worse flus (came from birds), and all sorts of other stuff.

And we have the capacity to eliminate pathogens that don't have animal reservoirs. Smallpox is extinct and polio is relatively close.

Don’t forget AIDS, which has simian origins!

People who would pay attention to warnings like that are probably not the same demographic working in the wet-markets in the first place

Another reason we all should go vegan: prevent disease outbreaks.

(besides: kindness to animals, lower climate impact, solve food scarcity, human health)

I agree.

It’s possibly a combination of the infected urine, feces, and blood from infected animals. And it mutated into something that transmitted to humans.

And it doesn’t even have to be a wild animal. The wild animal could’ve just been the carrier, and was immune to the actual virus.

And it was your house pet that got sick from it, and had infected bodily fluids. And then when you clean up your pet, your infected hands touched your mouth or eyes, and you got sick. Then you might’ve transmitted it to someone else with a weaker immune system, and they got sick, and so forth, and now we have a full blown pandemic.

So it could have been a wild animal that transmitted their infected feces to your house pet, or to a stray dog or cat. And dogs urinate on every tree, and other dogs like sniffing and licking that urine. Then your dog licks you or your kids. Gross.

Maybe it’s time I became a vegetarian. Although you can still get E. coli poisoning from unsafe industrial food processing.

But that sweet meat and bbq sauce.. delicious.. I.. can’t.. resist..

its the industrial scale that animals get exploited on that makes outbreaks like this a lot more likely.

its also the industrial scale and treatment of animals that anger vegans the most.

Well there hasn't been much of a choice historically and a zoophobic approach would carry way too many other side effects.

Based on documented facts and best epidemiological guesses about the novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV, I think it will probably turn into a pandemic affecting most countries. Let's review:

  • human-to-human transmission while asymptomatic, truly the killer feature [1]
  • 15% mortality rate in first patients (6 of 41 are dead) [2]
  • cases/deaths doubling every 2 days [public data]
  • epidemiologist predicts 100x more infections in 10 days [3]

Caveats:

• mortality rate sample is small (41) and the first patients are likely to be the most severe cases (pre-existing conditions, weak immune systems, etc); so the true rate could be less.

• public reports of cases/deaths could be increasing slower than reported because Chinese authorities could be trying to be more truthful (IOW reported numbers are finally catching up w/reality); or alternatively public reports could be lagging reality because authorities could be increasingly hiding the facts or simply be less and less able to report and monitor as Wuhan is turning into a bigger unmanageable chaos every passing day

• availability of medicine may limit the outbreak. The pulmonologist who discovered the SARS coronavirus says they have several medicines ready: https://twitter.com/hhh05146721/status/1220953373622534145

[1] https://thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(...

[2] https://thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(...

[3] https://medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.23.20018549v1

I don’t know if you do this intentionally or if Hanlon’s razor, but you intermix source backed claims with made up ones. Nature does not claim the mortality rate is 11%. They do make a comparison to SARS’ mortality rate which was about 11% and argue that Wuhan coronavirus is lower in that regard[1].

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00166-6

You are right, I misremembered Nature's video (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00209-y claimed SARS, not nCoV-2019, had an 11% mortality rate.) I edited the comment.

> 15% mortality rate in first patients (6 of 41 are dead) [2]

This early report I believe is why the leaks (ie Romania and Brazil) from the bio facilities are stating such high numbers.

That's the official number they had, so what they thought was true, that's what people are leaking.

Data now seems it's maybe 3%. Unless there's something that confirms that early number.

China might be able to cover up numbers having it. Covering up dead bodies is very hard. We have Webo and it would have leaked by now.

Neil Ferguson, an epidemologist at Imperial College, suggested that the 2019 novel coronavirus’ Basic Reproduction Number (R0) [1] is about 2.5, which aligns with figures from other research groups. The 1918 pandemic-causing flu’s R0 was between 2 and 3 [1] while seasonal flu’s figure is only 1.3 [2].

This is not to say everyone should panic as the strict containment policy that China and the Chinese adopted should help reduce the R0 significantly. However, the asymptomatic period is long, thus it remains to be seen what the full impact of this virus will be.

Other countries may need a better policy to track high-risk individuals already in their territories.

“Neil_ferguson @neil_ferguson

R0 estimates for flu pandemics lie in the 1.5-2.5 range. Yes, Measles is much higher (10-15). An epidemic with an R0 of 2.5 could still infect between 60% and 90% of the population, depending on contact patterns and assuming no prior immunity. Not all might be symptomatic though.”

https://mobile.twitter.com/neil_ferguson/with_replies

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number

[2] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2231333-what-are-the-sy...

> as the strict containment policy that China adopted should help reduce the R0 significantly

What strict containment policy?

Quarantine of 12 cities and 35 million residents. Suspension of tour groups out of the whole country.

What more can you do?

https://qz.com/1790891/china-expands-quarantine-to-12-cities...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/25/world/asia/china-coronavi...

They quarantined Wuhan, and announced it 8 hours before they did it, they estimated 200k people left Wuhan in a rush. Yet people are still entering and exiting Wuhan for CNY. So as far as I'm concerned this quarantine is just political face.

That is still 98% quarantine rate and should significantly reduce the chance the infection will establish in other cities.

I don't understand why people eat monkey or bats? if they have all these virus or diseases in them. It's 2020 we have more food in the world than we did years ago no need to eat a bat just grab an apple.

We're talking about a place where this is common practice.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zrv78nG9R04&feature=youtu.be

Supposedly the Chinese government is paying for the output from this sewage/gutter oil process (for combustion in power plants) in order to prevent it from ending up in the food supply chain as cooking oil. Attempts at being resourceful can have some unintended consequences/second order effects.

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/et981n/this_is_how_...

Food is still a large share of many people's incomes. It is not surprising to me that some people may want to eat free or cheaper food, still in 2020. Some of us may have plenty of food - heck many of us have way too much. But if you travel around the world really at all you would quickly understand why some may eat non-commercially produced food.

Also, still in the US people eat animals like squirrels, raccoons or feral pork.

Some people eat crocodiles, horse meat, etc. Eating cows or pigs themselves is pretty weird on itself, especially if you see how they kill and process the animal. The fact that we are used to se things is all that counts.

That being said, viruses were not transmitted by people eating bats. It was a species of cats that got infected by bats. As for cat consumption, well it is very easy to dupe somebody to eat cat meat thinking it is rabbit. That is why in a lot of developing countries when you buy rabbit meat they keep the furry head of the animal attached to the body on the bag so that you can see it is the real thing.

Good points.

In Australia, they also pride themselves on eating kangaroo meat. Can you imagine people eating a little baby Joey kangaroo?

But nobody bats an eye at this, or claim the Australians are backwards for propagating such a practice.

"Little baby Joey kangaroo" I take it you're not from Australia.

I’d rather catch a coronavirus than something like mad cow disease, anthrax, or tuberculosis, which all come from animals westerners eat.

The same reason people eat rabbits or deer and elk, despite the risk of diseases from them. It's 2020, we have more food in the world than we did years ago no need to eat a rabbit just grab an apple.

~ An Epidemiologist Who Really Hates This Bit of Othering That Always Shows Up In Outbreaks

Or cattle and poultry. So you’d probably indeed need to become vegan

For those of you into charts and graphs, here's a little tool from a reputable source that shows the risk of each country getting a case:

https://datastudio.google.com/u/0/reporting/e693c1f9-13fa-42...

Let's assume the worst-case scenario. It has a high mortality rate and is spreading with a high reinfection rate. Other cities will lock off shortly like in china. What are the steps to survive? How do you think the world will react? Will this lead to collapse? At least in the first step for tourism.

The official name for this is 2019-nCoV.

And for Twitter that is #2019nCoV.

Using the correct name (or including it in parenthesis somewhere) is a way to help your publications stay connected to the wider discussion.

According to a former Harvard public health researcher, the Wuhan coronavirus has a R0 value of 3.8. That is significantly higher than SARS (estimated at between 2-4). This means is will spread rapidly unless transport in/out of Wuhan is completely stopped:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1220919589623803905.html

The source article is here:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.23.20018549v...

That 3.8 may have since been revised downward....looking for the link again.

Just looking again - Imperial College are saying 2.6. But Neil Ferguson, part of that study from ICL, says on Twitter "we need to plan for the possibility that containment of this epidemic is not possible".

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1221134886825873409/ph...

Okay...a few notes on R0.

1) Neil Ferguson knows his business, but part of that is knowing that, like economists predicting recessions, there's little penalty for being wrong.

I'm sure you can find a quote that's similar from him for any recent outbreak. Why? Because of course we need to plan for that possibility. It's a low risk statement to make.

2) R0 is not a biological constant. It's a combination of contact rates and probabilities of transmission. Neither one of those is actually fixed.

I think the correct answer is Eric Ding is a typical Twitter user. Nutty.

https://mobile.twitter.com/ferrisjabr/status/122096355391127...

> Neil Ferguson knows his business, but part of that is knowing that, like economists predicting recessions, there's little penalty for being wrong

No. Do you think Nate wasn't penalised for his take on the 2016 US election?

Yeah, Eric Ding is being dragged by epidemiology Twitter for good reason.

As for Nate Silver, I'd suggest there are some very different circumstances there than academic and policy forecasting.

Different research groups are providing different estimates. But the estimates of estimates (model averaging) indicates that this epidemic has a good chance of sweeping the globe. Containment is needed to prevent it sweeping the globe, so we are at the mercy of the Chinese authorities...

We could pause international travel...but no one will make that decision until its already here..so

My group's estimated R0 for MERS was very securely in the same ballpark. There's a lot more needed for "sweeping the globe" than a single R0 measurement in a single context (R0 isn't actually a biological constant, despite people treating it like it is).

More likely at the mercy of mother nature.

I get a fair number of mail and packages from China, living in Australia. Some virus' can survive quite a while on non-porous surfaces like plastic, especially if the contents itsef is contaminated.

I now open packages outside of the house and spray the contents down with alkohol.

Yea keep those sneaky vectors in mind.

Very strange. Given HK is the 2nd most affected (and most affected last time) why it was not mentioned.

As regards to the source we really hoped it is not from the lab in Wu han, one of the few la e in the world with category 4 lab handling sars etc.

Latest figure is 56 death out of 1900. About 3%. Not high but that is the problem. The spread and low death rate meant widespread. Hope closing the cities would work.

the darkest time of coronavirus crisis is over，https://wubigo.com/post/the-darkest-time-of-coronavirus-cris...

What exacerbates the spread of these viruses is the lack of indoor heating in South China during the winter. I wonder how much china could reduce these problems by just allowing people to heat their homes the way they do up north?

Signup wall?

not for me. maybe cookie based? try a private/incognito window

A recent Time article [1] is theorizing that the source may come from wet markets.

It also theorized that the source of the SARS virus might have originated from an infected cat. And Ebola may have originated from infected bat feces, that might have landed on a girl’s toy, which she then put into her mouth. And the MERS virus in the Middle East may have come from an infected camel.

This appears to be a logical and scientific deduction.

So for this Coronavirus, it appears to follow the same pattern. Infected animal feces mutated into some virus, that made the transmission to humans.

My theory, is that perhaps an infected animal’s feces, may have mixed with other fluids, like blood, from freshly slaughtered animals, and mutated into something that infected a human with a weakened immune system (easy target), who then transmitted it to other healthy humans by contact.

On one hand, it does seem that the best way to guarantee that you’re sourcing your meat from a fresh and healthy animal, is to pick the animal that you want, and to slaughter it on the spot. This means that the meat vendor does not have to maintain a refrigeration system, and you don’t introduce other chemicals or salts to preserve your meat.

But the problem is that you have to keep the animals in captivity, and the meat vendor must handle, and clean all their urine and feces. And when animals get sick, their feces and urine gets infected, thus you increase the probability of an outbreak like this.

What’s the solution? Maybe China must begin eliminating wet markets, and eliminate the practice of keeping live animals in captivity, in order to minimize the incubation, mutation, and the transmission of such viruses. And instead, to begin using a refrigeration system, to preserve slaughtered animals.

[1] https://time.com/5770904/wuhan-coronavirus-wild-animals/

Comparison between "Bat SARS-like coronavirus" and the "Wuhan seafood market pneumonia virus" seems to show a 100% match:

https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?RID=2PUA1EJK114&CMD...

Bat SARS-like coronavirus WIV1 has been known since at least 2013.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_SARS-like_coronavirus_WIV1

In 2019, CBC reported "Canadian government scientist under investigation trained staff at Level 4 lab in China"

> A Canadian government scientist at the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg made at least five trips to China in 2017-18, including one to train scientists and technicians at China's newly certified Level 4 lab, which does research with the most deadly pathogens, according to travel documents obtained by CBC News.

> Xiangguo Qiu — who was escorted out of the Winnipeg lab in July amid an RCMP investigation into what's being described by Public Health Agency of Canada as a possible "policy breach" — was invited to go to the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences twice a year for two years, for up to two weeks each time.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/national-microbiolog...

> Canadian lab's shipment of Ebola, Henipah viruses to China raises questions. Shipment may be part of RCMP investigation into researchers evicted from National Microbiology Lab. Scientists at the National Microbiology Lab sent live Ebola and Henipah viruses to Beijing on an Air Canada flight March 31, and while the Public Health Agency of Canada says all federal policies were followed, there are questions about whether that shipment is part of an ongoing RCMP investigation. Ebola and Henipah are Level 4 pathogens, meaning they're some of the deadliest viruses in the world. They must be contained in a lab with the highest level of biosafety control, such as the one in Winnipeg.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/ebola-henipah-china-...

"Wuhan" is the center of this outbreak too. It's too much of a coincidence.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/24/virus-hit-w...

> Mr. Shoham, now with the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University in Israel, said the virology institute is the only declared site in China known as P4 for Pathogen Level 4, a status indicating it uses the strictest safety standards to prevent the spread of the most dangerous and exotic microbes being studied.

> The former Israeli military intelligence doctor also said suspicions were raised about the Wuhan Institute of Virology when a group of Chinese virologists working in Canada improperly sent samples to China of what he said were some of the deadliest viruses on earth, including the Ebola virus. In a July article in the journal Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, Mr. Shoham said the Wuhan institute was one of four Chinese laboratories engaged in some aspects of the biological weapons development. He identified the secure Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory at the institute as engaged in research on the Ebola, Nipah, and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever viruses. The Wuhan virology institute is under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. But certain laboratories within it “have linkage with the PLA or BW-related elements within the Chinese defense establishment,” he said. In 1993, China declared a second facility, the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, as one of eight biological warfare research facilities covered by the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) which China joined in 1985.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-7922379/Chinas-la...

> China built a lab to study SARS and Ebola in Wuhan - and US biosafety experts warned in 2017 that a virus could 'escape' the facility that's become key in fighting the outbreak

> The Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory is the only lab in China designated for studying dangerous pathogens like SARS and Ebola

> Ahead of its January 2018 opening, biosafety experts and scientists from the US expressed concerns that a virus could escape the lab

> In 2004, a SARS virus 'leaked' from a lab in Beijing

> Experts say the coronavirus that's infected more than 800 people mutated in animals and became capable of infecting humans at the Wuhan seafood market

> But a 2017 article warned of the unpredictability of lab animals that scientists at the Wuhan lab intended to inject with viruses

Sorry, this is wild speculation, not fact. The “100% match” you cited is for one protein (and a small one, at that - just 75 amino acids long) which proves absolutely nothing (individual proteins can often be highly conserved - and amino acid alignment doesn’t guarantee that the underlying genes are even the same).

SARS and MERS, highly similar viruses which emerged over the last 20 years, have a very similar emergence pattern to the new nCoV virus. Wuhan has a seafood market which has been known to house animals other than seafood. Initial cases were from those seafood markets. There’s quite literally no evidence to suggest that the Wuhan lab had anything to do with this outbreak.

> Wuhan lab had anything to do with this outbreak

The Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory is the only lab in China designated for studying dangerous pathogens like SARS and Ebola. What are the chances of coincidence that Wuhan is also the center of this current outbreak?

Maybe one of the lab animals somehow leaked and ended up in the food market.

Occams razor would posit that the presence of illegal food markets may be a higher predictor of illnesses than a BSL4 lab

I'm surprised no one has commented on how unhealthy, unhygienic and to some level immoral the consumption of genetically similar animals is. One more reason we should only eat creatures very genetically dissimilar to us. Eating bats, cows, rats, pigs etc will give you nasty results indeed because their pathogens can attack you very easily as opposed to a fish. (Actually eating undercooked fish can give you a nasty thing called liver flukes so even thats not safe)

Is HN now part of the misinformation bubble? The paranoia, national agenda anti China hate brigade are strong here.

Seriously, can people take a chill pill and stop spreading fud?

I read https://promedmail.org and I'm waiting for them to panic before I invoke contagion metaphors. It's way too early to state the infection and mortality rates

Viruses are scary. My company switched to work at home maybe 18 months ago, so I no longer am exposed to the viruses of my coworkers.

At the grocery stores at which I buy most of my food I use the self checkout, so no interacting with humans there.

At McDonalds I order and pay at the kiosks, so no human interaction there except when they hand me the bag with my food. At Burger King and Wendy's I do order at the counter, so I am talking to another human who is maybe a meter or so in front of me.

Every three months I have to pick up prescription re-fills so deal with a human at the pharmacy, and perhaps stand in line there with other humans.

I live in a house in a low density neighborhood, with no other house nearer than 40 meters, although my neighbors on one side have an RV in their front yard that is only about 15 meters from me, with an older couple (their parents presumably) living in it. No human interaction here other than occasionally waving at someone walking their dog on the street in front of my house (about 20 meters away).

Yet I still get the occasional cold-like or flu-like illness in the winter. Who is passing on these viruses to me?

Doorknobs, mail and Amazon delivery, sneezes upwind from your house, mosquitoes, rats, and such.

This may upset you... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180206090650.h...

> At McDonalds I order and pay at the kiosks, so no human interaction there except when they hand me the bag with my food. At Burger King and Wendy's I do order at the counter, so I am talking to another human who is maybe a meter or so in front of me.

These may not be that much better - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/29/mcdonalds-touchscreen-kiosks...

Are you avoiding human contact because you are worried about infection?

I’m not avoiding human contact. I use the self checkout because it is faster, not to avoid cashiers. Most of my social activities are online or solitary because those are what I enjoy, not because other activities would involve in person contact.

So when we switched to work at home, and so I was no longer in daily contact with people with school children (a big factor in spreading viruses), I hoped maybe it would mean much fewer colds and such.

When you use the self-checkout, you are putting your hands on a touch screen that has been touched by thousands of people a day.

Do you think that is a less likely vector of disease propagation, compared to interacting with one cashier?

Are you concerned that the cashier's hands touched your groceries during the scanning process?

If so, whose hands do you think put those groceries on store shelves?

Touching stuff other people touch, and then touching your eyes/mouth is a bigger issue than talking to people

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