Covid 'fuse' may have been lit weeks or months before the 'bomb' in Wuhan market
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
I don't think we were unlucky at all. If there was a 70% chance of this petering out it doesn't take a lot of tries to get one that doesn't.
I'd guess this is mostly driven by the orders of magnitude difference in peak viral load we see with SARS-CoV-2? But that's really something that needs research.
Of course it would have been great if the Chinese were more transparent during those early days (and in general honestly), but it's pretty clear that the original outbreak was just the first smoke escaping from inside the burning roof: by late December it was already an uncontained epidemic that had spread far outside Wuhan.
We'd like something that would pick up the disease before it makes it to the epidemic status.
The probability of death for a healthy 30-something year old is lower than their probability to die in a car crash (1/10 to 1/100 of all cause mortality for that age group).
It’s a game of probability, of course, but it turns out that whistle blowers often suffer from “coincidences” and “low probability events”, and whenever that happens, I try to take note.
Wuhan lost a significant number of medical professionals presumably due to this.
Think about this: If he hadn't died, he probably would have received much less attention.
There were a few other eloquent Chinese whistle-blowers from the early days, Jan-Feb 2020, who have been silenced by government threats or by being detained, who do not have the public recognition of Dr Li - probably because they didn't die.
https://www.nbc26.com/news/coronavirus/cdc-estimates-covid-1...
The 0.02% number covers 20-49; It is lopsided, so it's likely that 30 is much less and 49 is much more ... ; So, it's not 1/100 or 1/1000 as I claimed, likely 1/10.
Your numbers are off by a factor of at least 50.
This data is being looked at and it seems there were already covid cases months before reports of cases in Wuhan https://www.francetvinfo.fr/replay-radio/samedi-investigatio....
And of people that work with livestock.
Setting it up would be hard, and pulling the interesting data out of the firehouse would likely be hard.
We aren't realistically yet at a tech level where we DNA sequence everyone's minor sniffle just in case it's something new. But not too terribly far off it.
There evidently already are mechanisms in place to respond to alerts of new notable breakout diseases by DNA sequencing them, that happened to Covid very early.
There's some good points about jumping to conclusions in this article.
My experience: For decades, my father, my grandfather, and my great grandfather sold cattle via the Chicago markets. This is a trip of around 1000 km. This also originally started when our part of the US would have been no different than a very backwater part of a developing nation. No roads, no rail, no infrastructure, really, until you got to within 400-500 km of Chicago from where we live. And yet, they moved cattle that far to one single marketplace.
Animal to human transmission is a thing that exists and is known. Much less extraordinary, much more mundane, but much more plausible.
Until there is extraordinary proof of your claim, and not just 'I feel it' type of arguments, I will steadfastly believe it started from a bat, as originally claimed.
If you have proof of your claim, and I have missed it, please provide it. I would appreciate it.
I'm not being arrogant, and I don't understand your attitude. You are making an absolutely extraordinary claim. This absolutely requires extraordinary proof.
Again, I would be really excited to read about any proof you have of your claims. Please link to something, I would appreciate it.
It's not team sports, it's world issues.
The researchers discussed in the article believe the virus was present in a small number of people before the spread at the Wuhan market and view the spread there as among large numbers of people, not between the animals at the market and people there. So it's the crowds that were important there, not the seafood. Many countries around the world have densely crowded areas.
In order words, this was probably an unlikely event that could have happened in any country worldwide with densely crowded areas. It happened to be China this time, but that's coincidence and should not lead to anti-Chinese or anti-Asian hate.
Criticizing governments in China, the US, etc for aspects of their early pandemic handling is of course perfectly valid, as opposed to generalizing to the populations or ethnicities as a whole. But one should not discriminatorily focus on what China did wrong early on while ignoring the early mistakes of Western countries like the US, nor praise the US's mediocre pandemic results throughout most of 2020 while overlooking China's fast recovery through strict (albeit quite authoritarian) lockdowns.
For reference, I am American and not Chinese, but I still don't blame Chinese people generally for their government's bad handling of the early containment stage of the pandemic, nor for the coincidence that this virus spread from China.
this is wildly inaccurate. china single-handedly delayed world response by at least a month by jailing journalists, destroying samples, and lying to the WHO. comparing that to some degree of ineptitude in the US or anywhere else is nonsensical.
My point is not to defend the Chinese government's horrible early misdeeds, but rather that the current global pandemic situation is not uniquely or even primarily China's fault. Sure, perfect handling by the Chinese government would have had a chance of containing this pandemic within their borders. And clearly the bad-faith actions of the Chinese government early on were far from that perfect handling. But even perfect handling would still have relied on luck, and success would not have been guaranteed. In any case no country should be measured against perfection. Most of the consequences over the pandemic taken as a whole are truly the result of attitudes and policy decisions from countries other than China, very much including the US.
[Edited to replace most references to "China" to "the Chinese government", to emphasize the differentiation between the government and the people. I am just as opposed to hate against the Chinese people as I am to the early pandemic handling of the Chinese government.]
Yes
> and it came from China.
Yes, it seems that way.
>With a government that 100% cannot be trusted to tell the truth let alone defend human life,
Sure.
> it’s more likely than not this was an accidental leak.
This does not follow your other points. Just because it's within the realm of possibility that someone could have done it doesn't mean they did it. Just because someone is a bad guy doesn't mean you can attribute everything bad that happens in their house to them. Sometimes bad stuff happens and it's not anyone's fault.
Most likely they tried to cover it up and that led to it spreading more and around the world. If there was a true investigation, it would go up to upper/mid levels in the CCP and show how corrupt they were. In Asian cultures, saving face is everything.