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Comment by peter422 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t dispute it is one point of suspicion, but Wuhan is also one of the 10 biggest cities in China. It isn’t a surprise the first US outbreak was in the biggest city. The first cases could have been anywhere.

If there were more evidence that it was lab made then the location would be another point, not to me without further evidence it doesn’t mean all that much.

And there have been 2 emerging coronavirus outbreaks in the last 20 years due to natural origin. Why is it so hard to believe there would be another one.

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> I don’t dispute it is one point of suspicion, but Wuhan is also one of the 10 biggest cities in China. It isn’t a surprise the first US outbreak was in the biggest city. The first cases could have been anywhere.

Is that really so for animal-borne viruses though? I thought they came from place with lots of animals, hence the focus on the market. If it just showed up on some random high-rise employee downtown that would be hard to believe.

And after it starts, of course a highly-infectious virus shows up at densely populated places quickly. But for the same reason, I would also think it's hard for the first cases to travel to dense areas and spread the disease there without leaving a trail of cases along the trip. Ultimately they should point back to the animals they came from and testing can confirm it. Or at least rule various places out, if the govt was accommodating.

Plus wasn't the first US case somewhere in Washington state.

The first death in the U.S. was only discovered at least a month later, and this is long after we knew about the existence of the virus.

In China before there was a huge outbreak there is absolutely no way you can expect a small number of cases of a virus that nobody knows exists to be picked up. By the time of the big Wuhan outbreak there are already different variations in the virus. It had been in some population for a while before it broke out.

So the first outbreak in NYC is analogous to Wuhan. It could have started in Wuhan or it could have started anywhere else and then Wuhan had the right combination of factors for the outbreak to surge. We don’t know for sure.

We do know for sure that it started in Wuhan. The viral phylogeny is extremely clear. We have hundreds of thousands of viral sequences that describe a tree that is rooted in Wuhan around October 2019. That's incontrovertible. No evidence has arisen to contradict this despite an extensive search by thousands of scientists.

This suggests outside Wuhan, perhaps to the south https://www.pnas.org/content/117/17/9241

>There are two subclusters of A which are distinguished by the synonymous mutation T29095C. In the T-allele subcluster, four Chinese individuals (from the southern coastal Chinese province of Guangdong)

This reply only makes sense if covid-19 popped up at a random spot in Wuhan....and not literally right next to their coronavirus research lab.

It's not hard to believe that there could be another spillover event, and I don't have any certainty where covid-19 came from, but you're unfairly downplaying the level of circumferential evidence that does exist. There has been a significant effort against evaluating the lab-leak as a reasonable hypothesis (I say that in the scientific meaning of the word), and that effort has significantly damaged the reputation of scientific institutions around the world, and for good reason.

> If there were more evidence that it was lab made

Have you actually read any of these articles? The location of the lab is like the tip of the iceberg.

Yes I have read more than the articles, which is why I’m correctly saying it was unlikely to come from the lab.

I’m not saying it is impossible, just unlikely. And automatically degrading the opinions of experts who have detailed their arguments because you think they are biased is not proof of anything either.

The first US outbreak was in Washington state.

There are mountains of evidence. Proximity to the lab is barely the tip of the iceberg.

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