Comment by js2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by js2 | Hacker News Reader

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> evidence of zoonotic origin is equally thin on the ground

What are you talking about? Zoonotic origin is the source of the majority of viruses:

> Approximately 60% of the known infectious diseases and 75% of the new emerging or re-emerging diseases infecting humans came from animals. SARS-CoV-2 is the latest addition to the seven coronaviruses found in humans, and experts said that all of these viruses either came from bats, mice, or domestic animals.

> More so, bats are the source of the Ebola virus, rabies, Nipah ad Hendra virus infections, Marburg virus disease, and influenza A virus.

https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/26492/20200717/covid-1...

> An estimated 60% of known infectious diseases and up to 75% of new or emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic in origin (1,2). Globally, infectious diseases account for 15.8% of all deaths and 43.7% of deaths in low-resource countries (3,4). It is estimated that zoonoses are responsible for 2.5 billion cases of human illness and 2.7 million human deaths worldwide each year (5).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5711306/

> What are you talking about? Zoonotic origin is the source of the majority of viruses:

This makes the hypothesis very plausible as a starting point, but afaik there is no confirmed reservoir for SARS-CoV-2, the pangolin and bat hypothesis have not been confirmed.

One can conclude you believe it purely coincidental that the Wuhan Institute of Virolgy specialized in research on bat coronaviruses?

A paper in the lancet early in the year reported that the Wuhan Seafood market not only did not sell bats, but that many of the early patients reported never visiting the market.

At this point, it may be too late to ever discover the true origin of the virus.

It isn't coincidental. The reason the institute is there is because of the high prevalence of bats and bat viruses in the region. If you want to study bat viruses you can't pick many better places. The researchers involved, including connected US researchers, have been warning about this for years.

Ironically one of these researchers, Daszak, was politically targeted for his connections to this Wuhan lab [1], even though he and Wuhan scientists have been trying to get the attention to this problem for some time. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02473-4

The Wuhan lab being specialized in bat viruses means very little.

For one thing, this is a classic example of correlation != causation. Let’s say you had a shark attack on some beach and there was a team researching shark attack located right in that area. Would you then conclude that the team engineered the shark attack? The simple reality is that the most likely reason the team studying shark attacks is located in that region is simply because that region either has a history of shark attacks or even if it doesn’t have a history, is likely to have shark attacks. That’s why a team studying shark attacks would decide to locate themselves there.

The same is true here. Wuhan hosts a bat virology research institute because bat viruses are a higher risk here than in most places.

The other factor is that there is probably an infinite number of things that could look suspicious if there is such a disaster. It could be the presence of a bat focused research institute. It could be a conference that was held out there in the past few months. It could be a scientist from that region predicting a bat virus a few weeks before. It could be a district updating its pandemic protection plans in the weeks before. Etc.

The odds of any specific one of them happening are extremely low and would rightly make one suspicious. But the odds of at least one of the infinite suspicious things being true is almost 100%. And that’s probably all there is to it here. The presence of the bat research is just the 1 of many suspicious things that just happens to be true.

That being said, I think the strongest explanation is that Wuhan was considered a likely source of bat virus infections and that’s why the research was focused there.

The same is true here. Wuhan hosts a bat virology research institute because bat viruses are a higher risk here than in most places.

Except the bat in question doesn't originate in Wuhan. I can't remember the cave exactly but the Wuhan researchers documented the capture thousands of miles from the lab, several years ago.

This post goes into great detail: https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/a-propos...

I believe I originally saw it here on HN.

This works for sharks because they are a pre-existing condition. However if the bay with a shark bio lab was an origin of shark mutants, I'd assume the lab engineered them.

Everything that I've read suggests the bats from which the virus likely originated can only be found hundreds of kilometers away, so it must have been brought into Wuhan somehow. Either for food, or for research, unless you can propose another explanation?

> The bats carrying CoV ZC45 were originally found in Yunnan or Zhejiang province, both of which were more than 900 kilometers away from the seafood market. Bats were normally found to live in caves and trees. But the seafood market is in a densely-populated district of Wuhan, a metropolitan of ~15 million people. The probability was very low for the bats to fly to the market. According to municipal reports and the testimonies of 31 residents and 28 visitors, the bat was never a food source in the city, and no bat was traded in the market.

Source: https://archive.is/r4Yac

Now, I don't suggest that the virus was created in the lab, or deliberately leaked. But it had to be brought into Wuhan somehow. I just don't consider it dismissible, yet, that an inadvertent leak from the lab could have been the cause. I look forward to all new evidence that may emerge.

If the market was indeed the cause, then in the interests of global safety, wild animal markets of this nature should be prohibited.

With asymptomatic transmission the virus likely would have spread unnoticed in the town that was encroaching on bats for a while before someone brought it to Wuhan.

What makes that equally or more likely?

The concentration of early cases in Wuhan, hundreds of kilometers of away, would imply that the asymptomatic traveler(s) only traveled to one city, and didn't infect any other people along the way.

It's possible, but you have to consider the probability of all these events, hence the Bayesian analysis performed here.

Highly unlikely given the distances involved. This would be the equivalent of a disease found in bats native to northern Ohio somehow breaking out down the road from the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia, with no other cities or towns showing traces of breakouts prior.

The first SARS started out with a traveler - what's to rule out that this time it wasn't spreading asymptomatically in other regions and brought into Wuhan by a traveler?

What counts as zoonotic? What counts as engineered?

The lab was publishing research for many years. We know they grew bat viruses in HeLa cells that had been modified to have bat features. One would expect, as a simple matter of evolution, that the viruses would adapt to replicate without reliance on the bat features. It's breeding.

Now, is that zoonotic or engineered? Reasonable people could argue either way. Does the term we use matter so much? William Shakespeare wrote that "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

Either way, that is some seriously hazardous research with an obvious potential for permanent worldwide consequences. Somebody needed to say "NO".

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