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Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

Occam's Razor doesn't really apply to this one, because each side has different priors on which theory is actually the "simplest."

Given that, as far as I know, we don't have a single human case documented before those in Wuhan - something which a) should have been likely and b) China would be highly incentivized to root out since it would disprove the lab hypothesis, it implies patient zero was probably in Wuhan. If that's true, Occam could cut the other way, since the notion that case zero of a virus making a species transition would just so happen to occur in a city with a virology lab doing research on the same kind of viruses is a bit hard to believe.

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Wuhan is a gigantic city, bigger than NYC. You'll be able to find an example of nearly anything in any category there. But it's also completely unsurprising they were researching the coronavirus category: the 2003 SARS outbreak was a coronavirus too, and obviously motivated an incredible amount of research across the world, but particularly in China.

You're flipping the condition on the probability here.

Yes, quite deliberately.

> a) should have been likely

Given that coronavirus would not be observable until there is a cluster of symptomatic cases in a city (and a doctor with relevant experience who can observe multiple cases - here 李文亮), I find it highly unlikely that we could observe earlier cases, if they spread less rapidly or outside a city - or even within another city with less institutional knowledge.

> b) China would be highly incentivized to root out

Even if so, this doesn't form part of any prior. China being incentivized to act in that situation, doesn't affect how likely or unlikely that situation was.

The point is that even if we didn't observe such cases originally, given the incentives now, I would have expected China to investigate and surface evidence of such cases, even if circumstantial. So your second point is not a real point: the incentives don't determine the likelihood of it occurring, but they do dictate the likelihood of an investigation to determine if it did occur.

> China being incentivized to act in that situation, doesn't affect how likely or unlikely that situation was.

China being incentivized to find evidence supporting the CCP's desired image absolutely does affect how likely it would be for such evidence to surface if it exists.

We see virtually no such evidence; we can assume that's not because China's lack of trying to find it; which should adjust our prior against such evidence existing at all. Yes?

My belief is simply that there is no such evidence.

Reasonably convincing evidence, to me, would be:

- genetic precursor virus particles which have died and no longer exist - they are extinct, or,

- dated blood samples with immunological evidence of infection, sufficient that it isn’t just tampered/false positives. There’s no reason to expect this would have been collected.

i.e. if you haven’t collected it by 2019, there is never going to be any evidence.

This also answers your sibling commenter: it’s not in China’s interest to publicise any such search, when the odds of discovering anything (even if there were earlier infections) are vanishingly low.

After thinking about this statement a bit, I must also admit the possibility that it did not originate in a lab yet finding evidence that it did not is still very difficult. That said, I still think that CCP's default strategy to cover up everything and shroud the truth is now hurting it more than if they were just honest and straightforward about what really happened.

Are they incentivized to do that? Remember they’re dealing not just with The west’s opinion, but also home opinion, where I don’t know that documenting that they should have found this weeks earlier would go over well. Not to mention I think they’re happy with the current local conspiracy theory that this was actually the US’s fault. It also seems likely that a big city especially one with a big lab would be more likely to be able to identify that the disease going around was new

I'm not an expert on China but I would generally assume that the consequences and reputational damage of being seen as responsible by the rest of the world for COVID-19 would outstrip nearly any other possible consequences being mitigated against by not seeking to clear themselves.

> we don't have a single human case documented before those in Wuhan

The disease spread all over the world before people discovered the first cases, so it's not very surprising if previous cases on a less developed area than Wuhan were ignored.

Well, sure, but my point is that now that people are suspecting it was the lab, we ought to expect China to be digging furiously for evidence of an earlier case. At least so far, I haven't heard of any such evidence.

Willful ignorance is the first posture I would expect from the CCP - that would be the specific avoidance of gathering evidence that would be embarrassing if found to exist.

The second posture I would expect (if the first posture was not takwn) is that if they did seek and find evidence of particularly embarassing variety, they would actively stonewall access to awareness of that evidence and do everything they could to suppress that evidence. The statement,

>we ought to expect China to be digging furiously for evidence of an earlier case

is prima facie either incorrect or irrelevant to whether your ever becoming aware such evidence exists.

China does not possess Western democratic institutions, (however flawed as even those might be), to achieve accountability. To wit, over here on the Western side of things, it’s going to be hard enough getting NIH to examine whether NIH funded this work in contravention of US gov mandates not to (see HHS Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight (P3CO) Framework, 2017).

there's no reason to think that case0 originated in Wuhan, so the lab coincidence is pretty weak. Wuhan is a big city with lots of travelers.

It would be nice to have a well-documented index case, but also quite unreasonable given what we know about asymptomatic spreading.

b) but not highly incentivized to let anyone else know wha they found out unless it rules them out as the source.

> Given that, as far as I know, we don't have a single human case documented before those in Wuhan - something which a) should have been likely

Um... why? The virus has to jump species somewhere. If the first documented case was in Shanghai, you could make the same argument.

I think what you're trying to say is that the jump had to have happened in Yunnan, because that's where that particular bat sample was found. But that's not what the data says at all. The Yunnan virus was a relative, not an ancestor. There are uncounted millions of wild coronavirus strains we don't see for every one we sequence. There is no reason at all to believe that some Wuhan-local bat, say, had a related strain that became the covid ancestor. Or some other species, etc...

Again, that's the way viruses evolve. It's the way pandemics start. It's the way pandemics have always started. Demanding that this is somehow a crazy engineered virus dropped on us by a despotic foreign government is... how pandemics start in bad movies.

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