Wuhan hospital traffic, search engine data indicate virus activity in Fall 2019
dash.harvard.edu
dash.harvard.edu
It’s the 21st century. There were many direct flights between Wuhan and the United States every day, as well as with other countries. If the virus were circulating in august that would have given it months to spread to the USA. We know from antibody studies and the lack of deaths that didn’t happen - the virus didn’t spread widely until 2020.
Vietnam has a population of 100 million and a land border with China. They activated their pandemic response in January and have had ZERO coronavirus deaths. Taiwan, again, activated their response on December 31, 2019, and has had only 7 deaths from COVID-19. These numbers are impossible to square with the idea that COVID-19 was in wide circulation in the Chinese population in August or September.
Therefore the idea that it was circulating in human-to-human transmission in China as early as 4 months before 2020 just can’t make sense.
This seems like science in service of politics or publicity - it’s already being breathlessly used as proof that China somehow covered up the virus for months as an attack on western civilization (again, this doesn’t make sense - when Wuhan actually did come under heavy threat from the virus, social media posts and videos did leak out to us in January).
Those results remained the same for over a month until I posted the above in a hacker news comment. Then I was down voted heavily and the results suddenly changed. I do have a picture of it, because I wanted to share the results with my friend and they dont use social media, so I forwarded a picture.
while I agree with the hacker news downvoters (the downvote, hate, hate, unsubscribe, rage, rage, you must be stupid crowd) that this doesn't prove anything, it is certainly part of the evidence building up.
Other could be that integrity search databases was compromised somehow and the term was introduced later. I don't know if this is technically feasible or not, but this shouldn't be discarded as a possibility, for sure.
And other is what is claimed here is faked up and really never happened.
edit: actually, someone posted a link that had an image that is almost exactly what I had taken: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/long-fuse-big-bang/2...
I am tired of being downvoted on hn for talking about it though.
This reads like someone with paranoia spreading unsubstantiated FUD. Either that or you've been sniffing too much Q Anon.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/long-fuse-big-bang/2...
It's a well established fact that the existence of the virus was initially being covered up and local doctors trying to raise the alarm were being silenced. Even mainland Chinese know this (and are angry with the authorities). One of those doctors was Li Wenliang who has become somewhat of a national hero after his death to covid[1]. Him and dozens of others were given a very stern warning to stop talking about the possibility of a new disease outbreak in the weeks prior to covid becoming official when overwhelming evidence made it no longer possible to sweep under the rug.
The only angle here is that the time when the outbreak began is earlier than thought. This isn't even related to the notion of any coverup. It could have been circulating for months in low volumes without anyone really paying attention. Until the outbreak reaches critical mass, all you'll get is micro clusters which appear and disappear without really blowing up - as we're now seeing in countries that got their first wave under control.
The fact that people here still think that the initial coverup is some sort of conspiracy theory, when it's common knowledge even in China, is a bit mind blowing.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/20/chinese-inquir...
I feel like this needs to be unpacked for a lot of people. There are two pieces:
1: This paper claims that the virus was circulating in micro-clusters earlier than currently believed. It makes no claims as to any coverup.
2: There is clear evidence of an aggressive coverup lasting at least several weeks prior to covid becoming official. This makes no claims as to when the virus started circulating. Only when the authorities became aware of it.
These two statements are unrelated. The root parent post poisoned the well by conflating them. This paper is just another step towards tracking down the origin of the virus, it has nothing to do with coverups - whether real or conspiracy theory.
You meant to say "too bad those stupid cops have been killing and stomping on black guys for about a century now".
To put it extremely mildly, it's not a response to that one singular incident. This one just happened to be unambiguously caught on camera.
As someone else pointed out, this is not a “now know”, it was public the same day in January that it happened.
Also, international flights mentioned were from other places than Wuhan - the international flights out of Wuhan were stopped at the same time as the domestic flights. https://www.factcheck.org/2020/05/trumps-flawed-china-travel...
> 1: This paper claims that the virus was circulating in micro-clusters earlier than currently believed. It makes no claims as to any coverup.
If the virus were circulating to the point of significantly increasing hospital visits in September, that means the Chinese doctors were covering up/hiding atypical pneumonia cases for months. (This doesn’t actually make sense because a virus doesn’t stop spreading because of a cover-up of course and would have escaped Wuhan much earlier)
They locked down all flights originating from Wuhan. In fact, they completely shut down the airport.
The incorrect claim that international flights continued was invented by Niall Ferguson of the Hoover Institution, and then spread uncritically by various news media, as detailed in The Independent: https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-independent-1029/20200607...
Li Wenliang was neither a whistleblower nor did he have any first-hand novel data to share. He, an ophthalmologist, received a private group message within the hospital from ER department director and he simply re-shared the message to other private groups with his classmates.
The ER director, Ai Fen, was the source of the hypothesis that some patients in the hospital had, incorrectly, SARS and she was the right channel to escalate in the first place. And her escalation was successful when 1 nurse was observed to have been infected on January 11th.
Li never intended to broadcast anything to the public. What he did privately share was far less detailed than was on the official Wuhan government site [1], the Hubei provincial site [2] and just general mainstream social media [3] from the same date anyway.
[1] http://archive.is/s9elD [2] http://wjw.hubei.gov.cn/fbjd/dtyw/201912/t20191231_1822343.s... [3] https://finance.sina.cn/chanjing/gdxw/2019-12-31/detail-iihn...
Are you going to shoot people with virus?
Also, I think just because it's circulating doesn't necessarily mean that there is a good chance of it being brought to other countries. If it really started off in a wet market, I can imagine that the people who are most susceptible to catching the virus initially are not those who can afford/have the opportunity to travel.
If I'm not mistaken, August is about when people return from summer holiday, and there aren't really holidays until Chinese New Year. There a week of holiday in October for National Day, but people typically travel back to their home town instead of overseas.
It feels possible that the virus could be limited to just transmission within China for a while, which gets spread with every festival between August and late December/January, eventually reaches a critical mass and spread to the rest of the world with people travelling due to Chinese New Year in early 2020.
I honestly don't think I'm right, and you probably spotted logical flaws in the example I have given above. I just want to point out that the problem is extremely complex, and even the facts that you have pointed out are only a small part of the whole picture that just happen to support your views and arguments.
The timeline of this disease being spread from August 2019 is incompatible with a lot of what we empirically know about the virus, and should be treated as wrong.
But this was in a senior citizen community town, so overwhelmed hospitals aren’t really newsworthy. And I personally only entertain the idea it was COVID-19, but it doesn’t make sense because the dates are all wrong.
Then articles like this make me wonder, what if it swept by undetected? Were the most vulnerable communities already hit and we didn’t notice? Could that happen?
It couldn’t sweep by undetected. When we actually got hit by coronavirus hard, alarms starting blaring immediately both in local health department stats and in CDC FluView which tracks “influenza-like illnesses” and pneumonia mortality.
1. CDC FluView data - the coronavirus outbreak in the United States is clearly visible as an historically large spike of pneumonia mortality. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm
2. New York city’s own surveillance system “ While only about 100 cases of the coronavirus had been confirmed in the whole state, the city’s surveillance system was, by the end of the first week in March, signaling a spike in influenza-like illnesses at emergency rooms. A few days later, the number of police officers calling out sick jumped noticeably, as did calls to 911 for fever and cough.“ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/nyregion/new-york-coronav...
The hypothesis of a virus circulating in August which eventually evolved into what is now SARS-CoV-2 is probably likely (and surely more convenient), rather than the alternative hypothesis of a virus suddenly emerging perfectly adapted to humans and human-human transmission close to a laboratory that studies and specialises in such viruses.
There were cases in France in December without connection to China: https://www.google.de/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-europ... and suspected cases in November: https://www.google.de/amp/s/amp.rfi.fr/en/france/20200520-sc...
To expand a little with my basic math skills: There's five, maybe seven days between all those infections and it takes months to snowball into a noticeable epidemic. 10 hops to 10 infections, another 7 to 100 active infections, it probably takes three months just to reach 100, a fourth month for 1000 from which point it should get noticed even in a million people city.
Secondly most people are infections for just a week, those with mild symptoms might be even less: Without coughing, singing or shouting (e.g. sport event) the chances drops even further.
Thirdly: The weather. The warmer it is the more often we open the office window for fresh air, we spend more time outside and are less likely to get into close contact for long enough to spread the virus.
For me August as a start of the local epidemic, even earlier for the initial animal-human transmission sounds very plausible.
Wuhan's population is an order of magnitude bigger than that.
"most implausible. The analysis of genomic data consistently and robustly points to the ancestor of SARSCoV2 (i.e. the host jump into humans) dating back to around November 2019, see e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S156713482... "
(The quote is from here:
https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/12702949067880980... )
Around november as the earliest month also matches the speed of spread of the virus, which we were able to observe and track all around the world. With that speed, August or September aren't plausible too.
- only 6 small hospitals were included, and far away from the wet market
- Baidu Search Index doesn't match what they claim https://imgur.com/a/UkcUZou
- No test for statistical significance, really?
COVID-like mysterious pneumonia was not that hard to detect, the hospital would be alerted once doctors and nurses got infected.
The virus that causes SARS is called SARS-CoV, and the virus that causes COVID-19 is SARS-CoV-2
It just so happens that this year was a moderately bad year in the US. I don't know about China. But, they'd have to exclude differences from a bad flu season to have any chance of proving their point rigorously.
It's a very cool analysis though.
0. https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/hcp/weekly-sur...
(sorry for the PDF)
The claim "far away from the wet market" still holds, these hospitals are not in the Jiangan District, and 5 of them are on the other side of the Yangtze River.
I was traveling in Japan and Taiwan in October of 2019. I came down with a weird flu-like illness that persisted for three or four weeks (much longer than a flu would have normally lasted for me). And it wasn't just that the symptoms persisted. I really felt sick for that long (with fever and sweats). The flu-like thing also came after a week or so of diarrhea. Could have just been GI issues related to traveling but who knows? Ever since it was reported that the pandemic may have begun earlier than had previously been thought, I've been wondering if I didn't in fact get this virus very early on.
I also had a colleague with me who was traveling with his wife. His wife was also very sick with some kind of super-flu like thing. She was saying it was basically the worst flu of her life.
Everyone I've heard with such an anecdote has received multiple negative antibody tests, anecdata! (Only two people I've known)
Are there any data available to support this claim? That would mean that the virus is cleared by the innate immune system and not the adaptive, but it is still a pretty bold statement.
The last I read (a Nature Genetics study, if I recall) was that the antibody quantity was lower in milder cases (but with a large inter-person variability).
> That would mean that the virus is cleared by the innate immune system and not the adaptive
Not necessarily, because adaptive antibodies produced through previous exposure to coronaviruses can also bind to covid19.
> Nevertheless, rare but recurring RBD-specific antibodies with potent antiviral activity were found in all individuals tested, suggesting that a vaccine designed to elicit such antibodies could be broadly effective.
Very low levels, but still produced. (Note that I still have to dig through the paper.)
In addition:
> Plasmas collected an average of 39 days after the onset of symptoms had variable half-maximal neutralizing titers ranging from undetectable in 33% to below 1:1000 in 79%
Of course this is only a single study and more research is needed, but I notice people draw way too strong conclusions from studies that show low seropositivity prevalence.
I would still like a way to prove or disprove it though, and same as you, anyone I’ve talked to about it says the antibody tests just aren’t good enough yet to prove anything conclusively.
Even the data we do have available sucks. There’s a bunch of States and counties which still aren’t reporting or aren’t reliably reporting recoveries which is artificially inflating the active case count in the United States.
On a whim, I decided to go get the abbott antibody test to see if it was Covid-19, because it sure seemed like it might have been. But no, negative.
In Bergamo it's closer to that from early data, but for example in Milano it might be from 4 to 10 (but in this case the sample was blood donors, so skewed towards younger and healthy).
As a counter-anecdote, I know two people from a less hit area, both of whom had fever, and none of them had any antibodies (like, the test said 0.0 for both IgM and IgG).
If that's true then my argument still holds. How can 80% not get antibodies if they were detected in 57% of large random sample of some population?
I agree with that part, even if the sample was not random.
https://www.360dx.com/immunoassays/study-finds-abbott-corona...
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/05/cdc-and-s...
For example, the Abbott test has a surprising accuracy [1] "Researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine found Abbott’s test had a specificity rate of 99.9% and a sensitivity rate of 100%, suggesting very few chances of incorrectly diagnosing a healthy person with the infection and no false negatives."
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/08/study-suggests-abbott-covid-...
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/false-negatives-covid...
What is important is that antibodies are a sufficient but not necessary indication of past infection. There seem to be plenty of people who don't develop them when exposed, possibly due to effective T-cell immunity.
This is not the nasal swab test that sometimes misses positive people, as you mentioned.
To avoid confusion over this issue: There is an Abbott nasal swab test, that gives results 15 minutes after being swabbed, and without "special equipment". That specific Abbott test (the instant nasal swab) has experienced dubious results in practice, even compared to more standard nasal swab tests.
The antibody tests are a different animal. They test to see whether you might have been infected in the past, by looking for antibodies in your blood. So these are blood tests, and, I expect, have less chance for user error.
But also, I think lots of covid antibody tests are not high accuracy even "in theory". It seems the FDA relaxed oversight on companies producing antibody tests: ". . . after being criticized for the fumbled rollout of diagnostic tests during the start of a global pandemic, the FDA swung hard in the other direction, waiving its usual requirements and letting firms rush self-validated [antibody] tests into the market."[1]
So there are antibody tests from over 200 companies out there. Some of these antibody tests are quite accurate, high sensitivity and specificity. Others, not so much.
[1] https://khn.org/news/hype-collides-with-science-as-fda-tries...
Influenza isn't one thing and the flu can have severe symptoms. Swine flu is also still going around. My wife's coworker (large tech company in the Bay Area) was positive for swine flu around March.
And, in most places, test positivity rates.
For months in my area covid-19 tests were only available for people with symptoms matching covid-19 - and those people were still testing 95%+ negative for covid-19.
Since T-cell immunity is rather hard to test, you may never know.
The implication of conspiracy theories is that the Chinese government:
* Perfectly covered up the initial outbreak
* Took no further action
* Utterly failed to cover the "second leak" that led to the pandemic
Seems unlikely?
An alternative theory is social media now disproportionately focuses on the regular bell-curve extremes of our normal flu season.
It seems that everyone says they have the flu when they become unwell, until they actually get the flu. The difference is quite clear when you get it.
Eventually, it spread to my son and myself. It's the sickest I've ever been in my 40+ years of life. We didn't return to anything resembling normal until early October. It can't have been COVID but there must have been at least one really nasty flu bug going around last year.
https://academic.oup.com/clinchem/advance-article/doi/10.109...
I wouldn't take a study with N=256 (103 positive, 153 negative) seriously in claiming the specificity is a couple percentage points lower than the manufacturer's standard. That's simply too low of a cohort to draw that conclusion.
Even the conclusion from that study you linked was actually that the test wasn't that accurate in the first 14 days of infection (which is already known for ab tests), not that test specificity is lower.
Abbott's marketing referred to a study of 125 patients confirmed positive by PCR, linked below. So it's more, but not dramatically so. The affiliated study doesn't report a confidence interval, but the binomial 95% confidence interval is [97.1%, 100%]. That barely overlaps with the independent study's [82.8%, 98.7%]. So perhaps the affiliated researchers just got lucky and the independent ones got unlucky, or perhaps too many of the independent paper's >=14 day samples were <17 days and they should have waited longer; though depending how cynical your priors are you might also conclude the groups were different (not to allege any misconduct, just to say there's a lot of reasonable judgment in what patients you select that could push the result around by this small amount).
Regardless, the sensitivity of the test is definitely not an unqualified 100%. Even disregarding the independent study completely, that would still be a somewhat misleading claim, given the small sample size in the affiliated study and that patients with mild illness probably develop lower titers than the average patient who sought medical care over the last few months.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.27.20082362v...
There is a chance antibodies for this simply do not last very long, or that many people fight it off before it reaches the adaptive immune system and requires antibodies (there are many layers that have evolved in our immune systems).
There are many other viruses that don't produce long lasting immunity as well. Hepatitis B vaccines require 3 shots within a few months and even then, the take rate for it is only around 60%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karol_Sikora
There’s likely a reason why that’s on a conservative business’s vanity site and not a scientific journal.
My guess is the person you were chatting with heard some hyperbolic statistic about ELIZA tests and is repeating it.
It also means you are likely to get infected again.
I'm guessing this is a common trend for people who are over analyzing their symptoms in the past year.
Maybe it was covid... but it just doesn't tell us anything since there's obviously a reporting bias here.
Here's a video on the flu from 1918 that killed many. It's a few years old and talks about our responses to virus and how they trace them. It's enlightening.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48Klc3DPdtk
In any case, it could have been a bad flu infection. An antibody test would really help. I know several people who had a bad flu that was detected as influenza.
Exactly, I just got tested for antibodies, and since my insurance has lapsed as my Industry was the worst hit in this pandemic I had to pay out of pocket. It was $99 for the visit, and $50 for the lab results.
They said there was a program where the State would pick up the tab but they'd need my credit card on file in case it doesn't get processed etc... I just opted to pay for it instead and keep the State out of this and pay those people who are currently risking their lives working at hospitals and clinics.
They were super busy, too. They said it would be a 30 min affair and turned into nearly 2 hours. I'm glad I opted for antibody test and not the swab (I'm no longer showing symptoms) because I can see why Human error is one of the biggest reasons its yielding less than ideal validity.
It’s $10 with insurance with one caveat that your state may not allow self testing without seeing a doctor.
It makes sense because the thing they’re getting in to is mucous membranes, which the GI is lined with.
Some of my friends where making regular trips to central China in the late 90’s and described how anyone joining them got horrifically sick at least once. Though regulars tended to have fewer issues. Presumably, they where in contact with a range of local diseases most of which never spread widely enough to become a pandemic.
It’s surprisingly difficult to track the this stuff in part because many diseases make the jump but then simply die out without gaining a major foothold in the human population.
I was wondering about this the other day. How can we know if some other zoonotic coronavirus spread to a only single rural household somewhere? Is there any way to estimate this? Is there any literature on the subject?
So there simply wasn't any death toll before mid-March that suggests at all that the virus could have been spreading much earlier.
Likewise, we would have seen the hospitals becoming overwhelmed earlier.
Any unchecked spread in the fall or January would have caused those charts to have started spiking much earlier. There's no evidence for earlier community spread, and good evidence against it. You can't have a virus that can spread widely, and only later turn on its lethality.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/28/us/coronaviru...
I can only recall one such illness that I experienced. I was in college living on campus, and I felt like I had been hit by a truck for 2 days before I made it to the campus clinic. I tested positive for influenza, but if I hadn’t, and this pandemic had happened 6 months later, I almost certainly would have been tempted to attribute it as one of these supposed extremely early cases.
I know at least half a dozen people who have the exact same theory - a couple got tested and it came out negative
p.s. No, it wasn't COVID, at least I recently tested and was said that I don't have it. I haven't asked if I have antibodies though.
Also, I was sick three separate times in the first three months of the year. Very different symptoms each time. There were nasty colds going around.
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/health-officials-to...
> Three people have also died, but Dr. Benjamin Schwartz of the Fairfax County Health Department said Wednesday afternoon that those who died were "older" and had complex health problems. Officials don't yet know the extent to which the respiratory illness contributed to their deaths, he said.
I want to say that spillover events, or a virus jumping from X host to humans, happens all the time. COVID became a pandemic because human to human transmission was possible from genetic mutation. Usually with spillover events humans are a dead end host and the person infected will be an n=1.
Heck yes. PNA cx will come back negative a good 2/3 of the time. Doesn't mean an awful lot.
In all honesty I would love to see a study done on how this virus came to be but this study should be conducted on a purely scientific stand point. In fact it'd be best if we took politics out of the picture and ask
- what was the chain of transmission from its original animal source?
- what type of mutations took place?
- how in future can we come up with a robust international/interspecies virus surveillance program such that we can flag animal viruses which are likely to mutate to infect humans?
As of now all I can see is that both US and China are misbehaving and taking shots at one another. Our global supply chains have come to a halt. There are countries like US and India which overproduced food yet out of fear of lack of food these countries have halted export causing problems for other countries dependent on them for food. Yet, farmers in these countries are having to throw away crop because they cant sell there produce domestically. As a human race can we really stoop any lower?
Since when is diarrhea a COVID-19 specific symptom? Using Baye's the probability of Covid-19 given diarrhea is:
prevalence of covid in general pop (medium low) * probability of diarrhea given Covid-19 (very low, given we only recently found out this was a symptom at all) / prevalence of diarrhea in general pop (the prevalence of diarrhea in general is definitely higher than Covid-19).
Which lends to a very small probability. Pre-print publications like this based off of shaky data should be taken with a large handful of salt.
How do the scientists here account for the disagreement - beyond the fact they are using completely different methods?
Alternatively, I'd be interested in somebody explaining why my understanding of the TMRCA is incorrect - like I said, its not my field.
There is ample reason to believe Chinese authorities lied about when they observed specific strains.
The TMRCA calculations would have ample information to provide a statistically accurate date without a single Chinese genome at this point. Those early Chinese genomes merely act as a validation that the genetic clock is "ticking" how the model(s) estimates that it did.
Mutation rate is essentially based on how many people the virus passes between not really time.
So if China is lying about the number of infections early on (or even simply doesn't know the true number) then the calculated time of first infection would be off.
A highly contagious disease would hardly be not noticed during a time of free travel. You could also do the reverse math knowing what we know about its R-naught.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311910366_Cities_of...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23074528
China reports infectious disease counts and deaths each month. The numbers from December '19 were insane compared to '18
I just don’t buy it. If Covid-19 was in wide circulation, affecting hundreds of thousands of people as early as September and October, how come it wasn’t all over China? Or the rest of the world for that matter. What was keeping it in Wuhan?
There’s no way it could have grown within the wuhan population, to affect that many people that early, without it being propagated all over the place. People just travel too much these days in China.
They may have boarded up Wuhan, only after dissapearing journalists and citizens showing the severity of it as the CCP lied about its transmission, but the rest of the Mainland were free to rush into Hong Kong despite local opposition and Medical workers warning of spreading the virus. They overwhelmed the medical system and on were recorded on social media platforms sneezing and coughing directly into often touched areas in public spaces.
It is seriously not hyperbole that the CCP should face Crimes Against Humanity for biological warfare.
It sure sounds like hyperbole. Hong Kong has had a bit over 1100 cases so far, which is frankly trivial.
And that is because of their personal efforts, not the CCP who forcefully kept the borders via Carrie Lam's legislation open against Public outcry.
Hong Kong had already learned the lesson from SARS outbreak, and understood what they needed to do to lessen the contagion and they quarantined and limited human contact--they even stopped protesting despite it being in full swing in late November to early December.
There medical system was still overwhelmed and PPE was scarce while they were still treating mainlanders who came in droves and continued to abuse the system and foment violence amongst Hong Kong citizens. Many mainlanders were supposed to quarantine but violated the 2 week mandatory period and were out in public and going into restaurants with their armbands indicating they were supposed not leave their home/hotel. If I had the time I'd go look for the videos and pictures, but I'm sure you'd try to rationalize that away some how, too.
You can look at the numbers and try to draw erroneous conclusions, but that doesn't tell the entire story; you know what does? The CCP violently enforcing the Security Law Bill, beating and killing protestors that have eventually led to Hong Kong citizens now having to flee to Taiwan and the UK now.
Thanks for a detailed and careful response, lack of agreement doesn't mean we can't build bridges of understanding :)
Granted, but as a fellow biologist myself (Cellular, Molecular by schooling but excelled in Mircobiology) you have to see forcing a separate country, that you've had violent conflict with since 2014, to keep its borders open while virulent vectors are coming in and overwhelming a population's medical system [1] as well as Society for what it is: Biological Warfare. All while withholding critical information of its severity, and then using the WHO as a mouthpiece to spread propaganda and mislead the Global Community about what is occurring all while suppressing your own citizen's and physician's who do not fall in line with that narrative and continued to post the horrible medical conditions, arrests, and deaths happening in real time in Wuhan on social media.
Then, quite likely because of their State sanctioned conditioning, are let loose on the street breaking quarantine requirements in Hong Kong and are then caught on camera purposelessly coughing and sneezing into elevators, stairways, railways etc... all of which are used by the public in daily Life in what seems like a way to propagate the the virus into other hosts in Hong Kong. What other motive would there be to do so?
Hong Kong being, as I mentioned before, victims of politically influenced and targeted violence by the CCP over the violation of the Sino-British Joint pact agreement that stipulated HK's 2 systems, 1 country conditions must be honored in order for China to be given Hong Kong.
How is this not biological warfare in your view? Moreover, the fact that you really think that China did anything to 'halt the spread' shows just how quickly even trained biologists are to buy into this false narrative. Its simply not true and shows how effective the CCP's propaganda is and for anyone involved with the HK protests its very clear how overtly they tried to spread the disease.
1: https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-wuhan-hospital-w...
In china? The difference is that outside of china, if you die, it's reported as something like "died of heart attack bought on by influenza virus", or "died of complications caused by influenza virus", etc.
In china, if you have /any/ underlying condition, the reported death is the underlying condition, not influenza.
There doesn't seem to be any real evidence for this theory in the genetic data we have.
https://virological.org/t/phylodynamic-analysis-176-genomes-...
(1) Genetic diversity increases with both time and size of the infected population. You'll get a lot more diversity if it's mutating in 4 million individuals than in 4000.
(2) For a virus this young especially, genetic diversity is not at all precise measures.
This calculation shows this common ancestor existed between mid November to December.
> New research has deepened, rather than dispelled, the mystery surrounding the origin of the coronavirus responsible for Covid-19. Bats, wildlife markets, possibly pangolins and perhaps laboratories may all have played some role, but the simple story of an animal in a market infected by a bat that then infected several human beings no longer looks credible.
> A study published in early May by scientists at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., and at the University of British Columbia has uncovered an unusual feature of the virus’s recent development: It has evolved too slowly. The genomes of viruses sampled from cases during the SARS epidemic of 2002-2003 showed rapid evolutionary change during the early months of the epidemic, as the virus adapted to its new host, followed by much slower change later. By contrast, samples taken from recent cases of the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, have compara-tively few genetic substitutions compared with an early case from December.
> The authors, Shing Hei Zhan, Benjamin Deverman and Yujia Alina Chan, write: “We were surprised to find that SARS-CoV-2 exhibits low genetic diversity in contrast to SARS-CoV, which harbored considerable genetic diversity in its early-to-mid epidemic phase.” This implies, they argue, that “by the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, it was already pre-adapted to human transmission to an extent similar to late epidemic SARS-CoV.” This is potentially very good news: Because the virus is relatively stable genetically, a vaccine that works against it, if we’re able to develop one, will be more likely to work against all strains.
> The same study seems to rule out the possibility that infected animals at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan transmitted the virus to several human beings, as some have suggested as a point of origin. The Chinese authorities have now confirmed that no animal samples from the market were infected. This suggests that a single person brought a virus that was already adept at human transmission to the market and infected others.
https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan...
Is it just a coincidence?
Additionally, it is possible to accelerate virus gain of function by exposing it directly to the target host.
However, this is even stranger than the Chinese lab conspiracy theory, since this particular research is US funded.
I believe Dr. Fauci is advising the administration because he is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and been an advisor on epidemics to every president since Reagan.
I'm trying to make sense of the odd correlation between his involvement with the administration and that he was also instrumental in research about the very zoonosis the experts think occurred.
Perhaps it is all a coincidence. I don't know all the background probabilities involved.
https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan...
Fauci is not personally conducting gain of function research, but he is both funding and promoting such research. Particularly, he funded the Wuhan lab to research bat to human coronavirus gain of function in 2019 before the outbreak. One of the lead researchers successfully created a chimeric virus that is similar to how covid-19 theoretically became so good at infecting humans.
Obviously, there is good reason for this research, since that's where SARS, MERS and swine flu came from, so Fauci's foresight got him a few months ahead of the covid-19 pandemic. It is quite impressive that he picked both the vector and location prior to the pandemic outbreak. Seems like we should be giving him much greater recognition for this achievement.
You mean the US NIAID is funding it? Fauci doesn't personally review and approve every (or even any) grants issued by NIAID. The NIAID director is far too busy to do that. I think it's done by scientists who volunteer their time.
> Particularly, he funded the Wuhan lab to research bat to human coronavirus gain of function in 2019 before the outbreak.
The grant doesn't appear to say anything about gain-of-function research at the WIV. Are you getting this claim from Newsweek, or have you seen it elsewhere?
> One of the lead researchers successfully created a chimeric virus that is similar to how covid-19 theoretically became so good at infecting humans.
Really? Which researcher did that, and can you cite the publication in which they describe that chimeric virus?
> It is quite impressive that he picked both the vector and location prior to the pandemic outbreak. Seems like we should be giving him much greater recognition for this achievement.
It sounds like you're saying that Fauci engineered SARS-CoV-2, but I may be misinterpreting you. Is that indeed what you're suggesting? Where did you get this claim from?
It looks like the funding did cover the WIV research, from what I understand the article to say.
"The NIH research consisted of two parts. The first part began in 2014 and involved surveillance of bat coronaviruses, and had a budget of $3.7 million. The program funded Shi Zheng-Li, a virologist at the Wuhan lab, and other researchers to investigate and catalogue bat coronaviruses in the wild. This part of the project was completed in 2019."
Here's the 2015 paper co-authored by Zheng-Li Shi detailing a chimeric coronavirus that uses the SARS backbone to target ACE2, very similar to how covid-19 operates.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/
"Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone. The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV."
It makes me confused regarding the recent debunking article that claims there is no way humans can have engineered the covid-19 spike that targets ACE2, and there is no known backbone used in the covid-19 genome. Seems in contradiction to this 2015 paper.
You say that the virus in the experiment is similar to SARS-CoV-2. That just shows how little you understand what you're talking about. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. You know just enough to find these conspiracy theories, but not enough to realize why they're ridiculous.
Yes, I see that the WIV associated researcher Shi Zheng-Li just provided the genetic materials, and the experiment itself was carried out by Baric.
I don't believe the lab origin theory. As you point out, all the scientists believe it is ludicrous. I am just trying to make sense of this weird connection between Fauci and the WIV with an experiment that to my uninformed mind looks like it contradicts the official debunking article's claims that recently appeared in Nature. If nothing else, I hope to improve my bioinformatics knowledge through this research :)
I don't even think the grants in question go directly to the WIV. They go to an American organization that works together with the WIV on certain projects.
The actual scandal with the grant in question is that it was canceled for political reasons, despite being highly ranked by the scientific reviewers (and how obviously critical such research is, given what the pandemic has shown us about the dangers of emerging diseases).
"The NIH established a framework for determining how the research would go forward: scientists have to get approval from a panel of experts, who would decide whether the risks were justified.
The reviews were indeed conducted—but in secret, for which the NIH has drawn criticism."
From what you are saying, it sounds like the author is making a big deal out of standard procedure.
Gist of this paper:
The authors look for circumstantial evidence of community transmission of COVID-19 within Wuhan for dates substantially prior to the seafood market outbreak. They do this by attempting to triangulate* web search volume data with satellite mapping of Wuhan hospital parking lots.
*suggestively gesture back and forth between
In the parking lots, they're looking for more vehicles than expected based on prior years' imagery.
In the web search trends, they're looking for "disease signals".
Specifically, they're looking at two terms: a symptom of sufficient specificity to be useful for differential diagnosis of COVID-19 vs. influenza ("diarrhea"), and a more generic term representing influenza-like illness ("cough").
Here's the teardown:
1. "We developed a comprehensive list of hospitals in Wuhan (using Google Maps, Wikipedia and PubMed)."
List not provided.
2. Search terms are given in English even though they were actually input in Mandarin.
You can verify this by trying to search the English terms yourself. By process of elimination and the shape of their graphs, the terms had to have been:
"cough" → 咳嗽
"diarrhea" → 腹泻
Live link below. Requires signup. Make sure to select Hubei → Wuhan (湖北 → 武汉).
http://index.baidu.com/v2/main/index.html#/trend/咳嗽?words=咳嗽...
3. "We extracted the relative search volumes of the terms “cough” and “diarrhea” using WebPlotDigitizer, v4.215."
What? The values are provided on tooltip hover. This data is written into the page. You can just pull the real data out of the html.
Based on a cursory glance at WebPlotDigitizer, the vague method quote above appears to be tantamount to saying "we made up the data from screenshots".
4. They're looking at seasonal trends.
This is clearly visible from basic inspection. This is not interesting.
5. Their Relative Search Volume scale doesn't agree with Baidu.
Their numbers are wrong. Just look at Figure 2b's y-axis.
https://files.catbox.moe/v05oss.png
Maxima: It shouldn't go to 600. The actual values peak on Baidu at 711.
Minima: None of their data should be plotting near 0. The minimum volume in their date range is 76.
6. The uptick for "diarrhea" (腹泻) that they claim exists doesn't.
Again, this is Figure 2b. The red line is the problem here.
This appears to be deliberate fabrication. No competent researcher can miss the discrepancy between what this graph depicts and what the source depicts.
咳嗽 ("cough" / blue line on harvard preprint) was following a completely normal-looking seasonal cycle during the period under discussion.
腹泻 ("diarrhea" / red line on harvard preprint) was, again, following a completely normal-looking seasonal cycle, with a slightly elevated baseline.
The red line is mis-plotted to trend up in a sudden surge right where the researchers would need this to occur for their argument to hold any value at all. Then, rather than declining substantially prior to the January 2020 cluster, this plot depicts the trend holding through to 2020.
This information is simply false. That's not what Baidu reports.
Here's a side-by-side of the discrepancy:
https://files.catbox.moe/5s6i7o.png
Here's a superimposed version, for charitable reading of Figure 2b. I've stretched it to fit. Red should overlay green.
https://files.catbox.moe/eubuci.png
7. Screw the sat mapping, frankly.
If you can't be trusted to screenshot a graph without us having to arrive at this point, there's no point even assessing the content of your claims about something orders of magnitude more complex.
The sat mapping doesn't constitute evidence so much as it constitutes having paid for the visuals needed to launder this preprint into mainstream news. The only thing that can currently be done with this information is a data dump for other researchers to use.
8. Proofread your paper. 2019 → 2020 below:
> Both search query terms show a large increase approximately 3 weeks preceding the large spike of confirmed COVID-19 cases in early 2019 (Figure 2, c, purple). There is a large decrease in hospital volume and search query data following the public health lockdown of Wuhan on January 23, 2019 (Figure 2, third annotation).
9. No stats anywhere.
Can't do time series analysis without math. Spinning a yarn / telling a just-so story shouldn't be the level of reporting expected of academics in this context.
10. No attempt to build a keyword list or other reference information of continuing utility.
So the analysis dies with this one paper, essentially. There's nowhere to go from here.
[1] bottom row in this picture (I couldn't find an English source): https://www.rki.de/SharedDocs/Bilder/InfAZ/neuartiges_Corona...
Judging from my discussions with my MD and peer-group, I'm under the impression that in Germany, at least in my region, virii with that symptom are circulating every few years. Would expect something similar for China.
The immediate thing that baffled me was why they thought, a year-over-year count of cars in a hospital parking lot, was an indication of an early coronavirus outbreaks, which again, China was concealing from the world.
The news report only said they analyzed 1 year. Did they do it over several months? Or did they do it over 60 months, which might be a better sampling over time. Who knows. But that evidence is rather circumstantial.
Did they also consider that Wuhan doesn’t have as many local clinics, so when someone gets sick, they all go to the same central hospitals, for everything. This is also what added to the problems in Wuhan with the initial outbreak.
Then, regarding the increases in search queries for diarrhea and cough, two symptoms of the virus. But I’m sure searches for coughs go up annually during flu season anyways. I don’t think internet searches from random people over the internet, is a very good signal for anything, and may just be adding noise to the data anyways.
Looks like a fishing expedition to me.
would be cool to read similar research using US data, and the implications on policymaking.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&ge...
Or did I understand that wrong? Not saying this study is wrong (no way for me to tell), it just seems a very indirect, and thus error prone, way to look at it.
There is a suggested reason for the discrepancy (Chinese dishonesty about timelines) tho not an answer (yet) from the researchers who've commented elsewhere here or others with a strictly scientific explanation.
We need to find the close relative of Covid19 (TMRCA < 1 year) in a non-human host.
I felt like I was dying and my lungs were full of really bad stuff.
Around the time I would have showed antibodies you could not get a test in the US.
Needless to say, I believe the virus was around before it had been noticed.
That time frame of late Dec is normal flu season. Many people could have been walking around with covid and no one would have noticed.
Not to accuse the authors of anything, but I think the level of bias and wishful thinking in some public and political realm, when it comes to the origin of this virus, is bordering on hysteria. Does anyone still remember the evidence that Trump and Pompeo were seeing about the lab leak theory? Why is there no update coming from any "intelligence" source?
I think the fact of the matter is, the origin question won't be scientifically and satisfactorily answered until at least a few years from now, and only with teams of international scientists. In any case, it would be impossible to achieve that in such a politically charged environment.
But no matter how you spin this, IMO, the chineese is the source of this mess. And frankly it doesn't matter when it happened. It happened.
This seems like low-value data that doesn't mean anything by itself.
As far as I know, no federal agency has been willing to vouch for this conclusion.
I recognize there is skepticism about it coming from the lab, though I thought this is related enough due to how the indicating data was collected to share.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/report-sa...
Seasons are opposite in the Southern Hemisphere, and it is always confusing to read American or European information that references a season (I am in New Zealand).
Please Don’t marginalise those of us that are down under (we are already marginalised by physics causing long ping times to servers in the Northern Hemisphere, which is harder to change).
Here is the established timeline so far:
Nov. 17 - earliest reported dates involving corona in China, reported by US disease experts
Dec. 1 - first reported Wuhan hospitalization confirmed to be corona
Dec. 15 - first date of non-Chinese people I know who became sick with a contagious flu in Shanghai with the same symptoms as corona
Jan. 15-19 - first US confirmed case in Washington State
Jan. 23 - Chinese internal travel ban
Jan. 24 - Disney closes Shanghai theme park.
Jan. 31 - Trump's travel ban on Chinese flights.
So the window of interest is international travel from Dec. 1 to Jan. 15 - certainly SFO and LAX were flooded with corona - a large part of the 100,000 pax per week arriving in the USA from China.
The hospital parking lot data is significant because China destroyed Wuhan Corona Lab data, and denied there was an epidemic.
They will never admit to the coverup publicly except under extreme duress from Trump because they want to protect their dictatorship (Chinese rulers historically seek internal credibility, even when they don't technically need it in the short term.)
If Xi has to choose between a total trade embargo (or seizure of all Chinese assets outside the country as reparations for deliberately infecting 200+ countries) and admitting the corona coverup, he will choose the latter: he will admit it outside China, and censor it internally.
Note that HNers erroneously focus on post-Jan. dates, when corona spread internationally months before.
First Confirmed US Hospital Case in Washington State
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2001191
For those new to the above data, Dr. Victor Davis Hanson is in agreement, so check out his Youtube lecture videos. Search for "Victor Davis Hanson covid-19".
It's undeniable that there is a Chinese and WHO coverup. It's ongoing, with Australia receiving trade sanctions after they requested corona data from China.
It's to be seen if there's a coverup between China and the US over the Wuhan Corona Lab, which received funding from the US because of containment lapses. (Video from there shows lab technicians sitting around tables with syringes, etc. wearing no protective gear. So I have to wonder where that money went.)
The fact that clinical trials for the human version of the SARS-1 vaccine were never completed in 2003/2004 is absurd. (I don't know of any corona vaccines for sars or mers, although CNN had some article about "running out of a covid-19 vaccine" last week, which is not searchable today.)
The international media hasn't been diligent on reporting how early corona (SARS-2/covid-19) spread outside China, which is certainly 2019. This is important because the earlier the models start at, the lower the fatality rate calculation result is. In other words, the lockdown in May/June doesn't make sense with a start date of Dec./Jan.
New York is open, yet California, which has had flat corona hospital dashboard stats for months, is still on lockdown because Newsom plans a White House run.
So there are multiple levels of government and press coverups, similar to a Russian doll.
Does that answer your question?
I think the reason that my analysis is at odds with HN readers is that my focus is on mortality and policy, and HNers are focused on individual outcomes and the press cycle. (Dr. Victor Davis Hanson, the US' leading historian, is also a policy guy, and we don't disagree on anything.)
If you want to view more about the details about the effects of moving the goalposts on the initial date of corona infection:
The Failure of Expert Predictions and Models | The Coronavirus and Public Policy (Apr. 30, Hillsdale College)
> "As a matter of practice the National Center for Medical Intelligence does not comment publicly on specific intelligence matters. However, in the interest of transparency during this current public health crisis, we can confirm that media reporting about the existence/release of a National Center for Medical Intelligence Coronavirus-related product/assessment in November of 2019 is not correct. No such NCMI product exists," the statement said.
[0] https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/news/story/intelligence-r....
The schizo will take this theory as hard proof that China knew of the virus early. You and I will wait for hard evidence before we pass judgment, even if we privately believe that these circumstances are conclusive evidence.
The term seems to have entered the general public's lexicon in the aftermath of the Warren Commission report, which was decidedly not a theory about a conspiracy (it asserted that Oswald was a lone wolf, who didn't conspire with anybody.) Disagreeing with that meant you had a theory about Oswald or others conspiring; a literal conspiracy theory. But since then, the term "conspiracy theory" seems to be leveled against anybody who disputes an 'official' narrative, regardless of which side (if either) is putting forth a theory that involves conspiring. All theories about 9/11 are conspiracy theories (unless you can find anybody who seriously believes that all four plane incidents were perpetrated by lone wolves who, by pure coincidence, all chose the same date and methods.) As the term is commonly [mis]used today, it may as well mean "unpopular theory."
More like a hypothesis.
His supporters see him demonised by the establishment only to be proven right.
Edit: by does this often I mean leaking inside information
https://www.axios.com/trump-doesnt-read-his-presidential-bri...
> President Trump does not read the President’s Daily Brief, a document outlining the most important information collected by U.S. intelligence agencies around the world, reports the Washington Post. Unlike his predecessors, Trump instead asks for oral briefings on only certain intel issues.
>
> Why this isn't surprising: Since Trump took office, it has often been reported that he has a short attention span and prefers oral briefings and visual presentations over written documents and memos. Shortly after the inauguration, Trump told Axios himself, "I like bullets or I like as little as possible."
While he does sometimes speak based on internal information, his tweets and public statements are often based on his favorite Fox News TV shows and tweets he sees on his phone from his supporters.
"no evidence!!"
"fear mongering!"
"diversion!"
until suddenly there is evidence.
If you were interested in getting evidence for which there is none, what is the accepted way to talk about theoretical possibilities on this topic which doesn't illicit those dismissive and heavy handed responses?
First, your general assessment is wrong. The news was already reporting about US intelligence knowing about this in autumn of 2019, as well as China knowing about it [1]. So I doubt a few weeks ago people were saying "no evidence" to the suggestion that China knew about this in autumn.
That being said, what exactly is "this kind of speculation?" This article isn't "speculation." It's far more than that. So what do you mean "this kind of speculation?" What articles like "this" were posted a few weeks ago that were met with responses like the ones indicated?
> until suddenly there is evidence.
That's the difference between speculation and what "this" is. This has evidence.
> ...what is the accepted way to talk ... which doesn't illicit those dismissive and heavy handed responses?
I don't know what you are referencing a few weeks ago to offer up any specific suggestions. What I can say is that your comment hints on specific things, so I offer suggestions based purely on my assumptions.
1. Stop with the hyperbole. Be precise in what you are saying. Your comment here doesn't do that in the slightest.
2. Be humble. An active imagination is being equated to a researched article with sources.
3. Don't have an agenda. Your agenda here is questionable at best, and it's easy to see with the choice of words.
If you are serious about having these conversations, the best approach is start to prove the opposing side first. Look to validate the opposing view from your speculation and approach it that way. If your speculation is correct, it will come out.
[1] https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/intelligence/49...
I would be one of the people making the observations that the virus may have been around longer than the currently official records, which would be met with vitriol
I didn't make that clear because why do you think I have to do that?
> "As a matter of practice the National Center for Medical Intelligence does not comment publicly on specific intelligence matters. However, in the interest of transparency during this current public health crisis, we can confirm that media reporting about the existence/release of a National Center for Medical Intelligence Coronavirus-related product/assessment in November of 2019 is not correct. No such NCMI product exists," the statement said.
[0] https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/news/story/intelligence-r...
This is a rumour of a rumour of a rumour. Provide a source.