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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>The idea of this being an engineered virus wittingly unleashed on the world by some malevolent Party conspirators strains credulity--the notion is preposterous, especially from a country as obsessed with internal stability as China.

How about the idea that this is an engineered virus unwittingly unleashed on the world by some accident/incompetence?

If one reads the history of nuclear weapons/reactors, and how all kinds of BS, negligence, incompetence, has only by miracle spared us from major catastrophe at various times, one would consider what might happen with all those military virus labs...

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Because by far the simplest explanation is that this is a zoonosis. The virus is not particularly virulent, it doesn't seem to have an easy time of human-to-human transmission, and interesting coronaviruses have been found in animals in Asian wet markets many times before.

If one would engineer a virus, surely one would make it more dangerous than this?

I thought of that too, than my tinfoil hat went further on thinking that maybe this is just a QA test, a mild version of the pathogen released to see how far it spreads to fine tune the "production" version.

Or to stress test various nations’ biological controls with a “safe” virus that shouldn’t backfire and destroy the creator.

That's assuming, for the sake of argument, of course that a biolab creating these types of viruses for "offensive" purposes would only focus on one, extremely lethal virus and nothing else. It's easy to imagine that less lethal viruses are also created to study the effects of different modifications, and these viruses may be kept under less strict supervision than the worst ones (increasing the risk of it spreading).

Anyway, there's no evidence so far to support any of these theories, but considering China's record I guess it wouldn't surprise me. For now I still think the easiest explanation is the most likely.

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