Hacker News Reader

Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/23/politics/us-intelligence-...

> Importantly, the intelligence community still does not know what the researchers were actually sick with...

I suspect most organizations of this size see cold/flu cases - i.e. similar symptoms to mild-to-moderate COVID - in winter every year.

View on HN

I haven’t ever worked with anyone that’s been hospitalized for the flu. Here we have three staff in the same month.

But we're talking "sought hospital care". In the west, when I hear "hospitalized", I translate that as admitted to hospital from the emergency department because your problems won't be solved in 12 hours.

In China, "hospital care" might just mean the clinics at the hospital. Even in the west, I know family doctor units that are based at the hospital and that's where you'd go for regular stuff.

Tenth of thousands of people die from flu in the US every year: https://tinyurl.com/tc3c2mz2 . The fact that you have not worked with any of the victims means zilch.

And almost none of them are employed prior, so it makes sense he has not worked with them, and makes it suspicious that 3 working people went to hospital.

> I suspect most organizations of this size see cold/flu cases -i.e. similar symptoms to mild-to-moderate COVID - in winter every year.

And have to be hospitalized?

> CDC estimates that influenza has resulted in between 9 million – 45 million illnesses, between 140,000 – 810,000 hospitalizations and between 12,000 – 61,000 deaths annually since 2010.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

An organization with a few thousands staffers? Sure. (800k out of 300M Americans would be ~0.3% per year.)

Normally you have to be really young, really old or really sick to die from the flu. Not everyone but most. I hope the Wuhan lab didn't have multiple employees in any of those categories.

Edit: parent comment has changed so much my comment is no longer in context :(

> As of 2013, WIV had a staff of 266

http://institute.wuhanvirology.org/About_Us/Brief_Introducti...

If their average age was around 50 to 64, then we'd expect around 155.1/1e5*266 ~= 0.4 hospitalizations within the entire flu season, not just within one month.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1127795/influenza-us-hos...

yeah not necessarily related to any particular theory around lab leak, one could simply take this for what it is: further evidence of underreporting by china to WHO which seems to be fairly uncontroversial

This is really the point we should be focusing on. There is an extreme lack of transparency and thus conclusions are left to political conjecture.

It goes without saying a virology lab of this level isn’t the same as most organizations. Given the nature of their activities they have safety systems in place to prevent a virus from spreading at the work place.

> Given the nature of their activities they have safety systems in place to prevent a virus from spreading at the work place.

This is a silly assertion. Precautions are taken against the viruses being studied in the labs themselves - gloves, hoods, special suits if you're working with something like Ebola - but when you go to the cafeteria or visit someone's office, it's unlikely people were masking or distancing etc. pre-COVID.

Colds/flus likely spread like they do at any other workplace.

yes that's the most suspect part of this narrative. that lab workers working in an environment and educated about virus and communicative diseases would get sick and then go to a public emergency room against all common sense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com