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Comment by dnautics | Hacker News Reader

I think you mean wet market theory. This is true, but at least there was a "high bayesian prior" due to that being how it happened in the past. Nonetheless the wet market proponents were irresponsibly aggressive in their forcefulness.

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As other commenters mentioned there was a “high Bayesian prior” for lab leaks, too.

All of the previous lab leaks were of known viruses that had previously spilled over into humans via natural processes, then were collected and later leaked out (again). I'm not aware of any truly novel viruses that spilled into humans through a lab leak. Are there any examples?

What's your threshold for novelness?

We can't truly know just how novel covid-19 is; we don't have sequences from the database of coronaviruses, and even if we did it might have leaked right after it was collected, without having been sequenced yet.

Is "novel" the right criteria here? If Covid didn't have asymptomatic/pre-symptomatic infectiousness, it'd still be novel but may not have become a pandemic. Therefor may not have even been noticed, no tests developed for it, etc...

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

funny story, my elementary school was across the playground from this place, but moved out of that location the summer before the virus leak.

> This is true, but at least there was a "high bayesian prior" due to that being how it happened in the past.

I'm not an expert in the history of viral origin stories, but I'm pretty informed, and I'm not aware of any documented examples of pathogens emerging from public markets.

To be clear, I'm aware of lots of examples associated with pig and chicken farms, and several viruses that are presumed to have emerged from various kinds of "bush meat" (monkeys, guinea pigs, deer), but even these are pretty much correlative lines of evidence. A documented case of a virus emerging from a wet market? No. Moreover, if you've been to one of these things, it's pretty implausible as the source of a respiratory virus. They're usually outdoors, or in vast spaces. At least in farms you've usually got a farmer hanging around in a small building with hundreds or thousands of identical animals on a regular basis.

The evidence for the wet-market theory has always felt like one of those things that "scientists just know"...until it turns out they were repeating apocryphal stories to each other. This happens far more often than scientists care to admit.

H1N5, SARS

Neither originated in wet markets that we know of. Both appear to have been circulating in the community before the first cases were reported:

https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/34/Supplement_2/S58/459...

> In summary, the present evidence indicates that the H5N1 strains that caused the Hong Kong 1997 outbreak were reassortants from multiple cocirculating avian influenza virus strains

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3323155/

> On January 2, 2003, two cases of atypical pneumonia in the city of Heyuan, Guangdong Province, were associated with transmission of infection to several healthcare workers at the hospital (5). Investigation by the Guangdong Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention led to the identification of clusters of cases in six other municipalities (Foshan, Jiangmen, Zhongshan, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhaoqing) from November 2002 to mid-January 2003.

You're cherry picking reviews. Don't get me wrong, I 95% believe the lab leak theory for COVI9, but the wet market theory has a reasonably credible history.