Wuhan lab staff sought hospital care before Covid-19 outbreak disclosed

I also agree with you that if this is the outcome we're headed for, then we haven't gotten near any of the big icebergs yet. How's it going to play out and what will the real-world consequences be? I hope that the Biden people will be smart enough to approach this multilaterally and not make it the US vs. China spectacle that you-know-who would have. The fact that they're quietly confirming the facts that have been coming out, but otherwise not yet making a big deal out of it, gives me some hope that they're not idiots.

This is all silly-level speculative and it's possible that nothing will come of it, but I'd place a (small) bet otherwise. The way in which, one by one, the dominos are flipping is truly fascinating. Fauci has flipped, Daszak has flipped. Every few days there's another small but notable change.

How about those several million minks in Denmark?

https://www.who.int/csr/don/03-december-2020-mink-associated...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/03/new-killer-virus-chi...

Problem with that assertion is that knowing what we know today about the virus, this should have generated superspreader event situations along the travel path, which would have transported the virus to other locations in china.

Instead the opposite happened, and china tried to contain the virus to wuhan.

Everything listed by GP was known a year ago, which is why it was so frustrating to get dismissed as conspiracy theory.

In general, my trust for the media has fallen through the floor in the last decade. I used to think that the media was mostly trustworthy, but that they would cater to the establishment on certain issues (e.g., WMDs and the general Iraq/Afghanistan war effort) but apart from those obvious high-profile issues they were mostly trustworthy. Now I can't tell if I was wrong the whole time and I've just wisened up recently or if the quality of the media has plummeted (especially with respect to ideological issues) or both. I strongly suspect that the media has become considerably more ideological (abandoning aspirations for neutrality and objectivity in favor of activism and proselytizing, at least to a degree), but I've probably (and hopefully) wisened up a bit as well.

Many people, including in the media, would have preferred that theory was actively censored.

I have seen this claim made recently, but as I remember the 'disregarded' conspiracy theory was actually that the virus was genetically engineered (ie codon sequence edited) in a lab. The virus' genetic code seems to discount engineering, but not serial passaging/hybridization.

Depends what you mean by government officials. Trump was in power and his statements on this were called conspiracy theories. So the media wasn’t exactly taking the government side on this, they were dismissing statements by the government as conspiracy.

Whether right or wrong, it’s extremely embarrassing for the media. They are slowly politicizing themselves into untrustable entities.

Because it was a conspiracy theory.

Newly surfaced evidence may point in the direction of the conspiracy hypothesis, but that would be just a coincidence.

So I have to pipe in here as I recall this vividly. What crystalized this for me was of all things an op-ed piece by a conservative (not neocon) writer that essentially came down to this (paraphrased):

> There are essentially two possibilities here:

> 1. Iraq has no WMD. In this case the invasion is unjustified; or

> 2. Iraq has WMD. In which case, why wouldn't they give them up to avoid a US invasion?

This was such a simple and undeniable logical fallacy in the Iraq WMD invasion narrative it blew my mind.

I've been skeptical about the lab leak theory. But you can be skeptical about the theory and still recognize that the WHO just hasn't pursued enough leads to debunk the theory to a sufficient degree. Examples include:

1. China had an online database of coronaviruses. This was taken offline in late 2019 and hasn't been online since. The WHO investigation team has not examined it nor sought to do so. While the timing is certainly curious, it's not necessarily damning. But it warrants investigation (IMHO); and

2. Chinese labs have been less than forthcoming about what coronaviruses they have.

Chinese authorities have been less than fully cooperative here. Again, that's not damning. I consider it much more likely that Chinese authorities simply don't know if Covid leaked from a Wuhan lab but there's literally zero upside in finding out if that's the case.

Would you want to be a member of the CCP that released information that allowed the WHO to establish that Covid-19 came from a Wuhan lab allowing critics of China to "blame" China for this?

Nope, I wouldn't either. So why cooperate?

thus, the mainstream media, however mistrusted, is still the arbiter of widespread "truth." they still control the Overton Window. if they say a thought is unacceptable, most people won't accept it, until they say it's acceptable once again.

absolutely fascinating to watch

Interestingly, the inverse happened here. Most of the initial claims of a lab-origin for Covid were being disputed by mainstream media in no small part because the Trump administration was echoing them. A lot of them pointed to scientists claiming that there was no evidence of lab manipulation or gene editing as proof that it was conspiratorial thinking, despite the fact that that was not the same thing as a lab-leak. Very little of the evidence we have to support a lab-leak hypothesis wasn't available and known a year ago. But literally within a couple weeks of the Biden administration taking office, mainstream outlets like the Washington Post started publishing pieces supporting the credibility of lab-origins of the virus.

I am no Trump-fan by any means, but I've found this whole saga, and much of the last 4 years, to be a very mask-off period for the media, to the point where its hard to take much of anything being said too seriously.

One way you can do that is by putting evolutive selection pressure on the micro-organisms. For instance, submit a colony of bacteria to something they are vulnerable to. Stop when 90% of the colony is dead. Cultivate the colony back to a full size, then repeat the protocol until you get bacteria that are fully resistant.

- Our SOP should be better to analyze the information.

- Given the magnitude of the problem, more eyes should be on it

- tools and technologies should be better

It may still take longer, but all things being equal, we should not justify anything based on the past track record.

Your other point is valid though: if 3 people showed up in 1, 2 or 3 hospitals with severe flu, I would not think much of it, no one would.

Or, they thought then that the precautions were sufficient and the risks were acceptable, and they were wrong, and now would like to just look ahead and move on.

Not sure how you reached that conclusion. Collaborators from different institutions collaborate on research papers all the time while having no access to each others' 'safety logs'. Why would that be shared?

>Instead they say that everything is normal.

Which they obviously have no way of knowing, given that they are not on site, the research institute is in a secretive authoritarian country, and the implications for being 'responsible' for such a lab leak are monumental for such a regime.

>There is a weird double standard here of ignoring data that goes against this hypothesis and interpreting things that happened for every single other zoonosis in the world to be indicative of a lab escape. Such as, for example, three people out of six hundred presenting with symptoms of seasonal illnesses in the appropriate season.

The double standard is the exact opposite - flippantly dismissing the lab leak hypothesis without examination, on one side; a call to treat it on par with the purely zoonotic hypothesis and a recognition that neither hypothesis is close to being definitively proven, on the other.

You might want to check that. Afaik, it is 4 months .

(read comments below, I may or may not be correct. Sars1 has been found in Civets, bats and humans. We do not yet know the order of transmission and if civets were indeed the intermediate source.)

It took less than 4 months (feb 2003 -> May 2003) from identifying SARS1 as a novel virus to finding the intermediate animal (civet cats) [1] . It took 10 months to identify that for MERS. (Sept 2012 -> August 2013)

Given that we know it originated in Wuhan, have dedicated order of magnitude more funding to it and all the usual suspects have come up as a negative, the lab escape hypothesis does look increasingly more likely.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_respiratory_syndro...

Researchers from WIV collaborated with UNC Chapel Hill in 2015 to do that kind of research on SARS-1-related viruses, and that happened in the US.

That gain of function experiment in mice was also to gain function in mice, it would reduce its ability to infect humans.

And if you took RaTG13 and spliced in the surface protein of SARS-1 so it bound to ACE and then ran it through mice you'd still not wind up with SARS-CoV-2. The original virus is too far distant (only 96% homology) and running it through mice would produce a virus that was poorly adapted to humans. And the spike protein would look more like SARS-CoV-1.

Meanwhile the actual real people on the WHO team said they investigated and didn't find anything more than seasonal flu.

If the lab leak theory was easy to confirm, it would have been done already. Maybe someday it will be confirmed or ruled out and I’ll happily upvote that story. This isn’t it, though, even if it is the WSJ.

HN's front page is mostly determined by a tug of war between upvotes and flags [1]. It's common, indeed typical, for a sensational story to get a lot of initial upvotes, make the front page, and then provoke a "WTF why is this on HN" reaction from others, who flag it. With enough of the latter, the story falls off the front page, leading to a wave of "WTF why is HN censoring this story" from the first crowd. This is the cycle of life on HN. Recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27240048.

We do sometimes intervene to switch off flags, but only when a story is intellectually interesting and contains enough significant new information (SNI) to create conditions for a substantive discussion [2]. I considered doing that in this case but decided not to, because (a) it's not obvious that this is SNI, and (b) there have been several lab-leak threads recently. The most important thing to understand is that interestingness decays under repetition [3, 4].

If there hadn't been major threads on the topic recently, would we have turned off flags on this one? Well, the odds of that would be higher—but I still think probably not, because the new information in the story probably isn't enough to support a substantive discussion. If you look at those past discussions, you'll notice that in nearly all the cases, the articles themselves were among the most substantive ones that exist on the topic, and in most cases included SNI.

My GP comment had two purposes: it points people to interesting relevant discussions, but it also pre-empts the objection "WTF why is HN censoring this story". Users who post the latter have usually not yet learned to use the search box at the bottom of every page: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

> Here we show that SARS-CoV, but not HCoV-NL63, utilizes the enzymatic activity of the cysteine protease cathepsin L to infect ACE2-expressing cells.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1142358/

> DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project will examine the risk of future coronavirus (CoV) emergence from wildlife using in-depth field investigations across the human-wildlife interface in China, molecular characterization of novel CoVs and host receptor binding domain genes, mathematical models of transmission and evolution, and in vitro and in vivo laboratory studies of host range. Zoonotic CoVs are a significant threat to global health, as demonstrated with the emergence of pandemic severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) in China in 2002, and the recent and ongoing emergence of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV). Bats appear to be the natural reservoir of these viruses, and hundreds of novel bat-CoVs have been discovered in the last two decades. Bats, and other wildlife species, are hunted, traded, butchered and consumed across Asia, creating a large scale human-wildlife interface, and high risk of future emergence of novel CoVs. This project aims to understand what factors increase the risk of the next CoV emerging in people by studying CoV diversity in a critical zoonotic reservoir (bats), at sites of high risk for emergence (wildlife markets) in an emerging disease hotspot (China).

For a novel coronavirus to emerge in the part of the world containing the institute is not sufficient to implicate them. They are set up to do research in that part of the world, because such viruses are known emerge in such places. And yes, their research involved a lot of testing and categorization that requires some proximity to the wildlife and markets.

> The three specific aims of this project are to: 1. Assess CoV spillover potential at high risk human-wildlife interfaces in China. This will include quantifying he nature and frequency of contact people have with bats and other wildlife; serological and molecular screening of people working in wet markets and highly exposed to wildlife; screening wild-caught and market sampled bats from 30+ species for CoVs using molecular assays; and genomic characterization and isolation of novel CoVs.

And Daszak's role as part of the WHO investigation is similarly plausible. If you (unwisely, but just as a thought experiment) assume for a moment that it is impossible for the source to be a lab leak, he would be a perfect choice -- he is connected to some of the most relevant and nearby research!

I am supportive of further/proper investigation into the lab leak hypothesis, and do think some degree of public and political pressure is required.

But the tenor of the "lab leak" conversation I have with friends and that I see online (including here) is more like that of Russiagate (a mostly unsubstantiated, years long, liberal media conspiracy theory). Alternatively, it's like the idea that Iraq had WMD (some plausible concern, but info published from unnamed intelligence sources, using tiny amounts of raw and unverified intelligence data, taken from the least trustworthy informants imaginable, all to satisfy a pre-existing conservative grudge). I have seen people say the lab leak story reminds them of the doubts about WMD in Iraq, which is ironic, because again, I see it as more like the invention of WMD in Iraq.

[1] https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...

So lets change the example sense you will fixate on Ebola as being rare. Bird flu was a big thing people were freaking out about a few years ago and it even made a real appearance in Georgia.

I stand by what I said if a new bird flu variant showed up in Atlanta, the media would be showing alot more skepticism and be looking at a lab leak far more seriously by the CDC just based on the geography. If we found out a few CDC workers had bird flu symptoms before the outbreak started, that the government started destroying evidence and blocking investigations, and a few researchers just "vanished", we would be looking at bare minimum a cultural understanding that there was a Jeffrey Epstein level of corruption and conspiracy in front of us.

Lets rewrite what you wrote.

"An Coronavirus outbreak next to a BSL 4 lab in China would be a significantly stronger piece of circumstantial evidence than a bird flu outbreak in a transportation hub city in the Southeast United States".

Unfortunately at this point its become political, the "its a lab leak" is a point that favors conservatives/Republicans/Trump, so a large amount of the population would refuse to believe it no matter what at this point even if proof was uncovered, and at best are heavily biased to disbelieve it.

It took WHO over a year to be able to enter China. And what did they do? Release a memo denying laboratory theory without any evidence. No bat, nor intermediate has been found (not the case with SARS/MERS). Sure there is no evidence on lab theory either. The Chinese army has been running that lab since this started.

...but even still, 3 admitted to hospital for flu symptoms in that demographic is very high, statistically - even if literally ALL employees caught the seasonal flu at the same time.

People in China routinely go to hospitals for colds. It's cheap, and it makes you feel better, so why not.

Its already incredibly common for average Chinese people to go to a hospital for a cold, and I'd expect someone working in a virology lab would be even more likely to do so.

If you lay all the pieces of data out on a table, it's pretty easy to deduce this virus most likely originated from Wuhan.

The fact that China is not fully complying with releasing early COVID records and that the WHO is being sued says a lot...

Clear your browser cookies for the site.

But the second part of the comment doesn't contain an iota of nationalistic element to it. It simply is a fact as reported by numerous newspapers and felt by many businesses here in Australia. The CCP is punishing Australian businesses as the Australian government is pushing for a proper investigation into a disease that originated in Wuhan and has killed (reportedly) close to a million people so far. In fact It's important to note that it's not a reflection on the people of China, rather the government. I'm happy to be downvoted, probably with nationalist intentions! But I haven't said anything wrong here.

HN feels like the same kind of echo chamber that would have attacked me for saying not to invade Iraq in the early 2000s... Anything our historically dishonest intelligence agencies imply about foreign countries is eaten up like gospel truth without any skepticism.

I was laid out in bed with the worst upper respiratory infection of my life for most of late December and then again for two more weeks in early January after a brief recovery.

A handful of our coworkers had been in Wuhan in the 3-4 weeks prior.

IIRC, public toilets due to fecal matter were a possible infection vector (I hope I am using the term correctly) [4], which suggests that there had been covid cases since December in Italy as the traces were in waste water [2,3].

Some hypothesise that covid had been circulating in humans long before the market outbreak [5], this hypothesis does seem to corroborate the hypothesis that the virus had long spread before the first 'official' outbreak in Wuhan.

[1] https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20210311-surprises-about-french...

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-...

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53106444

[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiegold/2020/06/18/new-scient...

[5] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/mar-27-covid-pandemic-origin...

But that’s not what this story is about. It’s just about being hospitalized, which means nothing, without any additional data. It’s like running a story that Obama visited Kenya, when birth conspiracy was rampant. It’s something you’d expect from CNN/Foxnews, but not from a reputable journalist organization.

Tested by whom and how? If a trustworthy disinterested party positively identified the workers, took their blood samples, and tested them via a procedure with a low false-negative rate, then the test results are meaningful. Otherwise, there is reason for doubt.

It would not be in the least surprising if this was a lab leak, and it is no more "harmful" to speculate that it was than to speculate that it was a wild virus.

Do you realise that this is very easily true for any company or office at that time of the year?

Does the US government "have reason to believe that several teachers in a high school in Milan became sick in autumn 2015 with symptoms consistent with both Covid and seasonal flu"? Yes, it does! Good job, US government!

Well that depends on your objective. If it's to push a certain narrative, then it's bad if it contradicts that narrative; whether or not it's true is secondary.

What is "sought hospital care"? To get some Vitamin C or get some serious surgery? (In China people go to hospital more often I guess, as people tend to deal with ailments relying on doctors a lot, rather than letting it go by itself.)

Nothing told.

This is a dangerous difference.

> SARS-CoV recognizes angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) as its receptor, whereas MERS-CoV recognizes dipeptidyl peptidase 4 (DPP4) as its receptor.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41423-020-0400-4

That's what was being researched in Wuhan from what I've read in the media.