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Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

I'm no virologist but of all the places on earth we are supposed to believe that, by cheer coincidence, the outbreak happened in that one city that happens to do research and have patents on lab-modified bat viruses and that it doesn't have anything to do with that lab.

I mean: you seriously cannot make that up.

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To be fair, the reason the lab is in that place is precisely because it's close to a place where zoonoses has occurred multiple times. Kind of like how we don't blame lighthouses for shipwrecks.

That being said, from what I've read it appears that a lab escape is a very real possibility. Though I doubt that we'll ever find out

"Wuhan is ~1000km away from SARS spillover zones. Its human population was even used as a negative (no SARS) control group."

Via @Ayjchan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1394327680456220672?s=20

This is maybe 12 hours drive, depending on roads and traffic. 1000km is not a huge distance of migration to a major city.

There doesn't appear to be any relation between the labs founding and zoonoses in the local region.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology

I've heard this a number of times now, but is it actually true?

I find that argument hard to corroborate and there are other parsimonious explanations, like WIV was located in Wuhan because Wuhan is a major world city with high quality institutions of higher education.

It’s a pretty flimsy lie that incidentally tries to paint Wuhan as an unsophisticated backwater. It smacks of uninformed spin.

Your point about the lab is great, it's just very hard to dismiss the idea that a lab error was at fault.

But i too think it all too likely that we won't be any wiser about the origins.

Though it would be great if a timeline could be established, i don't remember seeing a good explanation on Covid in Italy being discovered in 2019.

https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...

I believe that Italy origin story was not credible. Snopes goes with Wuhan as the origin.

If zoonoses was used to pick a lab location, it should be somewhere in the Guangdong Province.

Nope, it's been debunked. The bats do not come from Wuhan at all.

That fact alone is what makes this even more absurd to me. I know about probability math, - the fact the these virologists seemingly just discard that factor is twilight-zone territory to me.

What does the phrase "I know about probability math" mean in this context? It sounds like you're implying that you have a probablistic model for this scenario, if so I would be very interested to see it.

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