Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic
science.org
science.org
Here's a discussion on inference pointing to references and sources that argue against the results of the paper: https://inference-review.com/article/thunder-out-of-china
It also raises eyebrows the fact that no animal has ever been found to be positive for COVID, in contrast to all of the previous SARS pandemics.
EDIT: thanks everyone for correcting my assertion. No source animal was found.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/...
EDIT:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_that_can_get_S... - long list of refs
Since this was a food market, it's possible and likely that all the source animals were eaten by the time the study was being done.
This doesn't really mean very much.
It took something like 15 years to find the bat population likely to have been the source of SARS-CoV-1. It's not like we were able to say definitively how the spillover began; it's all probabilities.
We have found similar viruses to SARS-CoV-2 floating around in pangolins and bats.
This is true but misleading. It took a long time to find the reservoir host (i.e., the animal in which most of the virus evolved) for SARS-1, but the proximal host (i.e., the animal that actually infected the first humans) was found within about a year.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2004/01/who-sees...
Based on the WIV's pre-pandemic research, we knew immediately that the reservoir host of SARS-CoV-2 is bats. We still haven't found the proximal host. It's almost certainly not pangolins, and Nature eventually published an extensive correction to their pangolin paper.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.07.184374v2
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2313-x#change-his...
The problem is that there really isn't any evidence. SARS-COV-2 has never been detected in any Chinese land animals associated with the market. We know that birds can transmit it, but it needs to come from somewhere. There's no reservoir of the stuff found in the wild...unlike viruses like Ebola, Marburg, MERS, etc.
There were two variants in the market...but given the speed at which SARS-COV-2 variants have mutated in humans, well, how likely is it that the market was the source? SARS-COV-2 went through millions of humans before the first variant popped out. Is it reasonable to assume that some progenitor virus went though millions of iterations to become SARS-COV-2 in the market, then did it again and again?
But however unlikely, this is where we are today. Was it just bad luck that some virus entered an immuno-compromised animal at the market and mutated...twice?
No, there were two distinct lineages in the market. That's different than variants.
The lineages are important because although the differences between the sequences are small, they are distinct, and there are no known transitional haplotypes.
> given the speed at which SARS-COV-2 variants have mutated in humans, well, how likely is it that the market was the source?
See Pekar et al: https://zenodo.org/record/6342616
They deal with this question directly.
Evolutionary biologist Heather Heying similarly reasoned the origin of the virus through an understanding of evolution. Covid doesn't appear to transmit outside. If covid evolved naturally, it would be capable of spreading outside, where animals live. Instead, it appeared to evolve to spread in lab-like air conditioned conditions only.
That is just replicating what nature does when it hops from individual to individual. Nature has billions of animals to do serial passage through.
And we still don't know that the species jump happened in the market, and I'm somewhat skeptical of the claims of this author. I tend to think it was circulating in rural Hubei, probably coinfecting domestic animals and people, getting better and better at infecting people until the market event happened which was where it found a densely packed human population where it spread with R0 significantly greater than 1 and took off. There's no evidence of that though because when the grandparents of farmers in rural villages die of pneumonia nobody bothers collecting samples because that's normal.
And we only noticed it when it started to efficiently infect human beings because that is when the pandemic started. The initial poor cryptic spread between humans and animals before that wouldn't have been detected because poor spreading couldn't cause the pandemic to start.
And we know that its possible for the virus to jump backwards and forwards between humans and minks, so the idea that an intermediate animal reservoir would have been infected with this virus and would have repeatedly attempted to jump to farm workers until it finally got good at spreading in humans is not that far fetched at all. Then the intermediate animal host becomes a massive bioreactor in close contact with humans, giving it many opportunities to roll the dice until it finds a combination that unlocks its pandemic potential, and then the first time it was transported into a dense human population it takes off.
There could be a hundred other viruses in animals in China all knocking on the door, occasionally infecting humans and not being good at it all right now, happening every day in China. This one was very good at infecting humans, along with being very good at infecting all kinds of other animals (mink, deer, dogs, cats, etc) because in order to cause a pandemic it had to be good at that, if it was bad at that it wouldn't have happened. It is like the anthropic principle--the virus seems incredibly lucky, because it had to be.
SARS-1 disn't have a presymptomatic infectious phase and the peak of symptoms was roughly the peak of infectiousness, and it was mostly severely virulent, and it didn't produce a global pandemic and was controllable.
To have an uncontrollable pandemic you really need that silent spreading, so the pandemic virus that emerges necessarily has that property from the "start".
How would a virus that's medium good at infecting humans, but not yet amazing at infecting humans, stay in rural Hubei for years without escaping?
This sounds like pure speculation. How much actual data do we have on viruses that just made the jump from animals to humans? Probably nowhere near the amount needed to confidently say that the original Wuhan strain was somehow too infectious to realistically be of natural origin.
As for getting better at infecting humans over time, covid _has_ done that. Whatever omicron subvariant we're on could run circles around the original strain without breaking a sweat.
> If covid evolved naturally, it would be capable of spreading outside, where animals live. Instead, it appeared to evolve to spread in lab-like air conditioned conditions only.
Did she make an actual quantitative comparison between the infectiousness of covid and other respiratory viruses, inside versus outside?
Dr. Fauci has recently been saying in interviews that the only masks that work are N95/KN95. When he was pushing cloth masks, did you go around calling that "pure speculation?"
Dr. Fauci has said, under oath, that when he was saying the vaccines would stop the spread he was just expressing a hope that would be the case. Dr. Birx says in her book she knew it would not stop the spread. When they were saying it would stop the spread, did you go around calling that "pure speculation?"
The "two lineages" argument has been grossly distorted by Worobey and the media. They're just two single-nucleotide polymorphisms apart, so they could easily have arisen in a single human-to-human transmission. SARS-CoV-2 averages something around a third of an SNP per human-to-human transmission, so ~10% of such transmissions differ by two SNPs.
If a missing link does exist, then it's just a single mutation away from either strain. So there's no reason to consider the "two lineages" too significant in any direction, unless you believe sampling in humans has been perfectly good. That belief seems unreasonable to me, especially since belief in a natural zoonotic origin requires us to believe sampling in animals has been perfectly bad.
https://mobile.twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/153463060722071...
The problem with that argument, is that it doesn't explain the polytomies and is misleading, as you accuse Worobey of being.
"Just a few SNPs" is disingenuous and glosses over the usefulness of this evidence that almost everyone agrees on - eg, that it's highly unlikely that lineage B evolved from lineage A. (Even Jesse Bloom agrees on this.)
It may take a bit to find consensus on the dual-zoonosis theory and related phylogenetics, but the eagerness with which people dismiss this issue drives me nuts.
So why do you take the two lineages as conclusive evidence of two zoonotic events (as Worobey has repeatedly claimed in the media, even though his papers are more cautious)? Given the above, I don't see how we can exclude that the two lineages evolved in early human cryptic spread, before we started sampling enough to draw a perfect phylogenetic tree.
Have you read Pekar's most recent paper in Science? I raise this in earnest, I'm reading it now. A lot of it follows the preprint, but the update more directly addresses many of the points we're discussing.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8337
My problem with the "just a couple mutations" deniers is that that viewpoint doesn't speak to any of the real phylogenic questions here.
But with just two SNPs, I believe that assumption is invalid. So while I believe those authors have correctly observed that we're missing part of the evolutionary history of SARS-CoV-2, I don't see how they decided whether that's unsampled spread in animals vs. unsampled spread in humans, except under that incorrect assumption.
I hadn't read the final paper, but I'm looking at it now. I don't see any new points that don't depend on that assumption yet, though. Do you?
They don't assume that. See the discussion in Pekar. ("The high extinction rate [...] Failed introductions of intermediate haplotypes are also possible.") The whole point of their epidemiological modeling is to disentangle the likelihood of this happening. (See: "Separate introductions of lineages A and B")
The tMRCA doesn't allow enough time for any deep cryptic spread. The authors show this. It's not assumed.
> We show that it is highly unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 circulated widely in humans earlier than November 2019 and that there was limited cryptic spread, with, at most, dozens of SARS-CoV-2 infections in the weeks leading up to the inferred tMRCA, but likely far fewer.
https://www.science.org/doi/suppl/10.1126/science.abp8337/su...
I haven't fully studied all the layers yet, but as far as I can tell it's numerical sludge, in the same general direction as econometrics, with so many free parameters or arbitrary choices in the model that you could plausibly get almost any result you wanted. Similar models got their chance to make falsifiable predictions of the case count in the actual pandemic, and they failed repeatedly, often by huge margins, in both directions.
For a specific criticism, the authors report that they're robust against variation in doubling time, but nothing about robustness to the extent of the overdispersion of SARS-CoV-2's spread (i.e., the superspreader characteristic, where most patients infect very few people but a minority infect a lot). They appear to model that only through the connectivity of the infection network, which appears to be fixed. All other things being equal, more stochastic early spread will make it harder to confidently reach any conclusion.
I'm not saying this work isn't interesting at all, or that I could do better; but it's many layers of stacked uncertainty. I believe the confidence that the authors express in this paper is already excessive, and Worobey's statements to the media go considerably beyond that.
Enjoy your criticism.
The output of their model is the structure of the resulting phylogenetic tree. I believe the primary determinant of that will be the extent of overdispersion of transmission, i.e. the shape of the pdf of how many people you expect each patient to infect. For example, let's say R0 = 2 and each patient always infects exactly two others. Then all lineages will survive (at least initially, until a significant fraction of the population is recovered and immune). The phylogenetic tree will be as perfect a binary tree as the mutation rate and our sampling permit. If we cut off the beginning, then we'll see many descendant lineages.
Instead, let's say the spread is absurdly overdetermined, so that each patient infects either zero others (with p = 0.99) or 200 (with p = 0.01). Then (after trying the simulation enough times for the pandemic to finally get started) our tree will just be a succession of super-spreading events, with far fewer lineages.
I believe that by manipulating that pdf, we can reshape that phylogenetic tree to almost anything we want. I see no description from the authors of why they believe the pdf resulting from their choice of a contact network is the right one, nor any study of robustness to changes in the shape of that pdf. Am I missing something?
They acted very quickly to sterilize the market which eliminated the evidence.
In SARS-1 the market associated with that was allowed to operate until investigators were able to take samples from the animals there and find the related virus.
As a containment measure this was probably the right reflex to have, as an investigative measure this was highly counterproductive. If, however, you are one of the people who blame China for not acting fast enough to contain the spread then you can't criticize them for this.
> There's no reservoir of the stuff found in the wild...unlike viruses like Ebola, Marburg, MERS, etc.
MERS just happened to be very easy since we sampled the camels and they were positive and sitting right there with lots of human contact. In the case of SARS-1 the actual progenitor virus was only found 10 years later in bats in Yunnan. With Ebola the species that harbors the virus has actually yet to be determined, decades later. Marburg was first discovered in 1967 and was only isolated from Egyptian fruit bats in 2009, 42 years later.
I think you're vastly underestimating how hard it is to track down animal reservoirs, and with the reservoir of Ebola still being unknown 46 years after it was discovered kind of undermines your entire point.
We also now have the BANAL viruses found in bats in Laos which are getting closer and closer to a match to SARS-CoV-2, which is actually good progress after only 2-3 years (it would actually be highly suspicious if someone found the 99% homologous bat progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 after only a few years of looking, that would suggest that China knew where it was all along -- actual science that isn't on the TV or movies is quite difficult and usually a lengthy needle-in-a-haystack process as all of these examples show).
Why do you keep saying this? As you know, the closest animal viruses to SARS-1 were found in civet cats and raccoon dogs, within about a year of its emergence in humans.
The bat viruses that Dr. Shi later discovered are scientifically important, because most of SARS-1's genome probably evolved in bats. They provide no new insight as to how the virus came to infect humans, though.
If you go back a few months before the pandemic outbreak in humans and there's a zoonotic jump to civit cat and raccoon dogs then I don't think you can usefully call that the reservoir species. It existed and evolved for decades in bats, which I'd call the reservoir. The jump to the intermediate animal I'd consider to be part of the pandemic mechanism (unless you can find SARS-1 in samples from a decade previously in those animals).
[ And another way to say this is why do we bother calling out an "intermediate species" when discussing pandemics? ]
I agree there's no evidence for any animal except bats as the reservoir for SARS-1 (or SARS-CoV-2). The intermediate host seems like the important link to show natural origin, though. Genetic engineers can't invent new viruses de novo, only modify existing ones, so a reservoir host must always exist; the question is just how it got from that reservoir to a human pandemic.
1. We quickly found pretty good evidence (infected civet cats and raccoon dogs, and infected human traders of those animals) that SARS-1 arose from natural zoonosis, within about a year of its emergence in humans. The later discovery of WIV-1 didn't add to this evidence.
2. We've found no such evidence for SARS-CoV-2.
That doesn't mean SARS-CoV-2 definitely arose unnaturally--we've expended a lot more effort looking, but it really is a harder problem. It just means we don't know, and we need to keep looking. Do you disagree?
With SARS-1 the market was still fully operating when they went looking for the origins.
Once the human pandemic kicks off and you find some civets or whatever with the virus, then how do you prove they had it before the humans unless you have lucky lab samples drawn from civets who were infected prior to Dec 2019? You'd need to do something like find civit-adapted SARS-CoV-2 which could be genetically dated to prior to Dec 2019 because there were simply too many mutations to have been backspill from the human pandemic. If the spread in civets started very shortly before the spread in humans then that would likely not be possible at this point. If you could find a virus in civets that was 5 years of genetic drift away from SARS-CoV-2 that would probably work, but that may never have existed. What remains is finding the persistent bat reservoir.
For now that's all academic though, since we've found zero animals infected by any lineage of SARS-CoV-2, excluding animals that we're quite confident were infected directly or indirectly by humans, from the timing, circumstances, and genomic evidence. I don't think your scenario is impossible, and the traders themselves also had good incentive to hide or dispose of suspect animals before anyone could swab them. There's inherently no direct evidence for it, though.
It seems like most arguments over the origin of SARS-CoV-2 eventually reduce to arguments over what the Chinese government has concealed, whether deliberately or accidentally as part of their containment protocol. That makes the argument hard to resolve, though there's still considerable unexplored evidence within reach of American or European subpoena, like a search through all available raw sequencer reads between September and December 2019 for contamination from SARS-CoV-2 or related viruses.
Ebola and Marburg for decades were quite rare. Incredibly deadly, but an outbreak would affect a few tens of people, and invariably in remote locations. By the time the epidemiologists arrived, the outbreak was waning.
Clearly the Ebola outbreak in 2010s was much bigger, but that was the first such large outbreak.
Also, with outbreaks in the rainforest, and perhaps with poor sanitation, there are thousands of possible animal hosts, whereas hyper-urbanised China hives far less opportunity for wildlife contact.
I don't understand how those viruses being rare in humans and outbreaks fading is actually making it harder to find them. If anything it is easier because then they don't have to figure out if humans gave it to them or they gave it to humans.
Id also guess the manpower that went into searching for the SARS2 predecessor far exceeds the efforts that went into sampling animals in African rainforest.
There might have been more manpower looking for the SARS-2 predecessor but, unlike with Ebola, there isn't any guarantee it still exists in a recognizable form, and in intermediate hosts you have the issue of human-animal transmission.
And I'm still skeptical that bats gave it directly to intermediate animals who gave it to people in a nice linear fashion. Humans going into mines (like the Mojiang miners) or bat guano farming could have become infected and given it to farmed animals that they were around first, and the pandemic could be the result of spillback once the virus got good at infecting humans (not needing to be particularly good at infecting the farmed animals because of massively crowded conditions).
In 1984: "During routine monitoring at a Pennsylvania nuclear power plant, a worker was found to be contaminated with radioactivity. A high concentration of radon in his home was subsequently identified as responsible."
Everyone affected was either dead or bankrupt from paying their family's medical bills. No lawsuits against the company.
Trollish usernames aren't allowed on HN because they effectively troll every thread they post to.
We've learned that it's better to deal with this earlier than later, so I've banned the account. Happy to rename and unban it if you want to pick a more neutral username.
This is a borderline case—we don't want to be prudes—but I suspect most readers would rather not have "stinkass" in their face.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksrWmPMZGiY [video, gets NSFW around 2:30]
Even this hypothetical theory doesn't explain the early lineage A / lineage B split and is not supported by existing data.
Which of the paper's authors do you believe are beholden to the "self-serving CCP party-line"? Do you see flaws in the paper's analysis, or are you perhaps employing a thought-terminating cliche?
It's quite plausible that the CCP is lying and the paper authors are honest about their findings. The problem is the analysis is only as good as the inputs. From the article:
> "Chinese government notified the World Health Organization (WHO) of an outbreak of severe pneumonia of unknown etiology in Wuhan...after careful examination of reported case histories..."
Note that:
1. The CCP claims the virus was unknown to them.
2. The CCP is in charge of what case histories are analyzed, and can carefully select those which point away from the lab leak.
This paper proves nothing beyond that there was a spatial relationship between the market and some of the initial cases. It wouldn’t have been hard for the CCP to discretely put some CV-19 distribution devices in the market, if the virus was released on purpose.
To take ejb999's example of radioactive water being found near a nuclear power plant, is it more likely that the radioactive water was found because there is increased monitoring of radiation near nuclear power plants?
It is important not to make emotional leaps to conclusions. Apparent correlations deserve study, but they are not proofs.
You made no effort at all to criticize the methodology (which looks pretty standard to me, consistent with methods used to pinpoint the origin of other disease outbreaks besides COVID), or the raw data. Not one of the listed authors is Chinese, nor do any of them have any Chinese institutional affiliations.
What is your actual argument for why I should disregard this, beyond 'CCP bad'?
If China is messing with the data, why do we even have data that shows the epicenter of infection moving southeast? Why not just hide or falsify it?
Those are pretty naive criteria based on what we already know about the situation. One of the biggest opponents of investigating the lab leak hypothesis was Peter Daszak, a British zoologist who is certainly not Chinese nor does his EcoHealth Alliance have any surface level ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. EcoHealth Alliance provided grants for the coronavirus research (and the activity that has been labeled by some as gain-of-research) and authored the misleading Lancet letter [0] that was used to ostracize anyone who publicly disagree with the animal-spillover hypothesis as well as enabled social media platforms and fact-checking sites to censor any content or discussion of the lab leak hypothesis.
TL;DR: people can have agendas that may not be obvious to you at first glance.
[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
My personal view is that it's impossible to know: the CCP has done everything possible to look guilty of hiding something, but unless there's some breakthrough where a source animal is found or someone in the CCP security apparatus makes a deathbed confession, I consider this an unresolvable discussion. That being said, I'm still 100% behind the shaming of people like Peter Daszak who have been shown to have acted in bad faith to cover their own asses.
For anyone reading these kinds of stories and reports but is not a regular China follower, there is one thing you really should know. Anytime the Chinese government reacts very negatively to a story (Denial, attacking, undermining, deflecting), it usually means the story is true. The Chinese government is really terrible at information management and addressing anything that might make them look bad or lose face.
Just admitting a Chinese lab collected, studied and by accident a lab worker got infected with COVID is just something China can not admit. It is perfectly reasonable that some lab somewhere would collect and study the COVID virus. What is unreasonable is that the lab or a lab worker just got sloppy and accidently released that virus out to the world.
...well, yes, of course they do. But they would also strongly deny the story if they thought it was untrue.
> Anytime the Chinese government reacts very negatively to a story (Denial, attacking, undermining, deflecting), it usually means the story is true.
So if they don't react negatively and deny something, then the story is... false? That doesn't make any sense.
Then why would block any investigation from outside the Chinese government? If anything, if the Lab Leak theory is provable false, they should be inviting outsiders to investigate and waste their political capital/time/energy. If your advisories want to spin their wheels on something that is not true, then let them.
> So if they don't react negatively and deny something, then the story is... false? That doesn't make any sense.
When it comes to the Chinese government and information, surprisingly as it sounds, yes. If the Lab Leak story was not true, the Chinese government would not even react to it. They might even entertain it as part of their information ops strategy since the Lab Leak theory is a plausible theory.
If you think about it, how does the Wet Market theory make China look better than the Lab Leak theory? It really doesn't. If serious pandemics are coming out of Wet Markets, then why does China still allow Wet Markets to exist? At least with lab safety, labs can be improved and managed better while Wet Markets are just ticking pandemic timebombs.
I can easily believe that the Chinese government, not exactly known for its openness, would be keen to block investigations into their bio research labs, regardless of what happened in Wuhan.
The potential upsides are few - would any doubters be silenced if the investigation found nothing?
I can also believe that even if they have no reason to believe that the lab leak theory is true and their internal investigations have turned up nothing, that they're not entirely convinced there is zero chance there wasn't a lab leak.
Even if they think there's only a 1% chance there was a lab leak, then the idea of an outside investigation is clearly dangerous to them. Blocking an investigation is safer.
Now imagine it's US, not China. Would US let anyone from outside to investigate its labs?
Let's assume the US is the epicenter of a global pandemic that killed 6 million people and $12 trillion in economic damage (and counting). And the US is refusing to cooperate with an investigation into its origins.
What is an appropriate response from China, Russia, and the international community?
Assume the US's military isn't the most powerful and technologically advanced in the world. Instead China's is the most powerful and advanced.
Ensuring the cause of the pandemic is understood and steps have been taken to greatly reduce the likely hood of it happening again is the opposite of deranged. Failing to do so is in fact deranged.
Is this still true? It is unfortunate that it took an event like this to prove what we already knew: lab workers, who are of course fallible humans, will make mistakes.
Given that Covid was released upon the world likely due to a lab accident and all of the damage it did over a span of years, it would seem reasonable to rethink whether unlimited experimentation and especially enhancement with viruses should be allowed. This in itself has proven to be a source of denial by the very virus experts (like Fauci) that do not want their area of science to be restricted.
This is entirely without evidence.
> This in itself has proven to be a source of denial by the very virus experts (like Fauci) that do not want their area of science to be restricted.
Even if you ignore Covid19 -- epidemiologists and virologists have been screaming for years that pandemics are hugely problematic and will become increasingly likely as we densify and further intrude into the urban-wilderness interface. We got extremely lucky that SARS1 wasn't as lethal or infectious as Covid-19. If the work virologists do (even the 'riskiest' work) could lead to new universal coronavirus vaccines or better treatments, it's a much more complicated question on whether to continue the work than ignorant opinions insist.
To make it clear, the Chinese government blocks any investigation by outside parties that they don't control or have influence over.
Virologists have pored over the genome and are highly confident it's a virus of natural origin -- that already greatly limits the role a lab could have played and doesn't require any input or approval from the Chinese government.
Repeating nonsensical statements does not make the statement clearer. Paying attention to what you want to pay attention to is fine, but it is not a robust way to process unreliable data.
Ignoring the incredible risks of playing with and even creating deadly pathogens and the high likelihood of it being released into the world serves what purpose other than to protect a small group of scientists that want to create Frankenstein pathogens for experimental purposes that are likely to be either weaponized or accidentally released? Even if there are some beneficial results from such research it is likely countered by the huge risks to mankind.
"This virus came from a lab - so we should ban lab research"
and
"You can't prove the virus didn't come from a lab - so we should ban lab research"
Nature is doing far more Gain of Function research than humans are capable of - as evidenced by literally every pandemic in history. I've generally found the people who are the most vocal about banning GoF have literally no idea what it entails and why the way pedestrians talk about is so cringeworthy.
How do you believe the CCP's reaction would be different from what we saw them actually do?
The real question is--how did the virus get to the live market?
The study accurately says, "While there is insufficient evidence to define upstream events, and exact circumstances remain obscure, our analyses indicate that the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 occurred via the live wildlife trade in China, and show that the Huanan market was the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic."
"The sustained presence of a potential source of virus transmission into the human population in late 2019, plausibly from infected live mammals sold at the Huanan market, offers an explanation of our findings and the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The pattern of COVID-19 cases reported for the Huanan market, with the earliest cases in the same part of the market as the wildlife sales and evidence of at least two introductions (38), resembles the multiple cross-species transmissions of SARS-CoV-2 subsequently observed during the pandemic from animals to humans on mink farms (46), and from infected hamsters to humans in the pet trade (47). There was an extensive network of wildlife farms in western Hubei province, including hundreds of thousands of raccoon dogs on farms in Enshi prefecture, which supplied the Huanan market (48). This region of Hubei contains extensive cave complexes housing Rhinolophus bats, which carry SARSr-CoVs (49). SARS-CoV-1 was recovered from farmed masked palm civets from Hubei in 2003 and 2004 (20). The animals on these farms (nearly 1 million) were rapidly released, sold, or killed in early 2020 (48), apparently without testing for SARS-CoV-2 (7). Live animals sold at the market (Table 1) were apparently not sampled either. By contrast, during the SARS-CoV-1 outbreaks farms and markets remained open for over a year after the first human cases occurred, allowing sampling of viruses from infected animals (20).
The live animal trade and live animal markets are a common theme in virus spillover events (21–23, 50), with markets such as the Huanan market selling live mammals being in the highest risk category (51). The events leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic mirror the SARS-CoV-1 outbreaks from 2002-2004, which were traced to infected animals in Guangdong, Jiangxi, Henan, Hunan, and Hubei provinces in China (20). Maximum effort must now be applied to elucidate the upstream events that might have brought SARS-CoV-2 into the Huanan market, culminating in the COVID-19 pandemic. To reduce the risk of future pandemics we must understand, and then limit, the routes and opportunities for virus spillover."
> you cannot claim one is more probable
Am I missing something here?
It's a source of constant disappointment.
And especially the things that are. That's what makes HN special.
I also frequently choose not to engage with ill-informed comment threads; I'm regretting my lapse in judgement today.
HN is probably overly scientific in this sense.
That seems to me the right thing to do. HN does that very well.
The chances are we'll never know, it may have spread through here (despite no real action to stop this form of trading from any of the wonderlfully eclectic groups still engaged in it).
> While there is insufficient evidence to define upstream events,
Also, we're not brave enough to say read the evidence it came from here. We're only brave enough to say it's the 'epicenter' of an early outbreak to keep from annoying those who don't co-operate anyway.
My guess is that someone was selling animals from the lab that were supposed to be destroyed.
AFAIK those markets are out-right banned already.
In 1975 the US GDP was about $7500/yr per capita (in 2021 dollars). Today the Chinese GDP per capita is around $10k/yr (more like 19k accounting for purchasing power parity).
You can pull all the numbers you want, but you can't steer from the fact that it's an impoverished shithole.
Chinese household median income is around $4,700-4,800 in 2021, with massive disparities between First world comparable regions such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin, and rust belt regions like Wuhan [2]. Even the Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has noted that 600 million Chinese earn less that $140/month [3].
This of course leads to the larger discussion about GDP per capita being a weak metric to use when analyzing regional development, but in general China is by most standards still a developing middle income country with a (relatively) small and overperforming hinterland.
[0] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1977/demo/p60-10...
[1] https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1975?amount=1
[2] http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202201/t2022011...
But even if it had been intended as a stop gap, at this point its large industry. So if you wanted to "clean up" as in, "end" the wild meat market trade, you'd be ending a large, growing industry, that brings money and food to poor parts of the country that can't afford other foods. Additionally, you'd be crushing an industry that is actively bringing new foods to market that aren't available in other countries, but for which China may one day be the primary agricultural provider.
Not an easy ask for any country to do, let alone a developing one.
If you're asking for better regulation of these markets, then I am sure China will do so over time. But authoritarian countries will never be able to self regulate to the degree a rule-of-law country does. Authoritarianism breeds a "if you're not cheating, you're not trying" mentality that undermines regulatory attempts.
Due to various policies, China is a relatively low-trust society. Of course, it's also low trust because ripping people off isn't necessarily seen as bad, it's seen as clever.
That issue is why live markets exist cause no one there trusts the meat to be what what they say it is unless they can literally see it.
(Wild speculation - may contain novel truth contamination)
It's honestly killed me support for democracy. 95% of people seem to be incapable of thinking about uncertainty and living with not knowing. They just jump headlong into whatever looks good. Facts and reason are just justifications for things their prejudices already decided.
When emotion triumphs logic and reasoning, that society is nearing end of times. Such was the case for Roman empire, increasingly people's mentality started to shift away from reality and into idealized and complex web of absurdities leading up to its down fall, much of which were spouted by its upper echelon awash with luxury and comforts unaffordable by its masses
We see such absurdities being pushed in schools (ex. Math is racist) and in society in general which then antagonizes and gaslights, attacks opposing nuanced views that throws its own narratives into question.
While doing business with authoritarian states, we've ended up resembling in some form. It's a damn shame, once again reminded that open societies remain open only as long as its participants believe it to be so. If we close ourselves to one view then we are doomed to repeat the same attrocities that closed socities commit against individuals groups.
Having said that, I looked up the polling on lab leaks and American democracy loses on this one:
https://morningconsult.com/2021/06/09/coronavirus-lab-leak-w...
48% "The Coronavirus spilled from a Virology lab in China"
28% Don't Know / No Opinion
26% "The Coronavirus moved naturally from animals to humans"
Here’s a link to that, if we’re open to differing perspectives.
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/lie-exposed-bbc-says-covid...
If people would actually read and digest the article before spewing out their own biases, then you would see that the article addressed this very contention.
The article pointed out several facts. One was that there were two strains already. Having that come from the virology institute doesn't make sense. It makes more sense if the virus was spreading and mutating amongst the animals in the market.
Second, is charting the concentration of early spread. Again, the market was the epicenter.
Third is looking more closely at that and seeing this same epicenter pattern in a specific part of the market. This again points to the market being the epicenter.
Fourth, there is no such pattern of infection around the virology institute that was conducting the bat virus research.
For some reason, neither the locations of the Wuhan Institute of Infectious Diseases or the Wuhan Institute of Virology are mentioned in the linked paper.
As far as I can tell (the writing style is not very clear IMHO), the Fig 2(B) blue cases are not second-stage cases, but rather a plot of "cases with no known link to the market".
As for your second point, I don't see any discussion in the paper that this cluster "occur[s] in an area of high density housing with a preponderance of elderly people". Where are you seeing this?
If you are not seeing such discussion perhaps you should read it more slowly. It's early in the Results section.
The clustering of COVID-19 cases in December around the Huanan market (Fig. 1, B and C, insets) contrasts with the pattern of widely dispersed cases across Wuhan by early January through mid-February 2020 (Fig. 1, D and E), which we mapped using location data from individuals using a COVID-19 assistance app on Sina Weibo (26). Weibo-based data analyses show that, unlike early COVID-19 cases, by January and February many of the sick who sought help resided in highly populated areas of the city, and particularly in areas with a high density of older people (Fig. 1E and figs. S9 and S10).
Fig 2B is an exemplar, as is clear from the description: 'Schematic showing how cases can be near to, but not centered on, a specific location.'
* "Sars-Cov-2 was Lab Made Under Project DEFUSE"
* "Was Sars-Cov-2 DESIGNED to Spawn so Many Variants?"
* "Vaccine Shedding Finally Proven!"
* ""COVID Vaccine Technology" will Make Varroa Mites Infertile"
* "Boosters Now PROMOTE Covid Deaths in Europe"
* "Developmental Disorders in Babies born to Vaccinated Mothers?"
A virus of (human)/(animal) origin was (un)intentionally (released)/(spread)/(detected) in Wuhan, starting at a (lab)/(market).
Narrative 1: Animal origin with extensive spread in a food market
Narrative 2: Animal origin with accidental release from lab study
Narrative 3: Intentional creation/modification of a virus for purposes of scientific study and subsequent (un)intentional release
Narrative 4: Intentional creation/modification of a virus for nefarious purposes with (un)intentional release
Narrative 5: Animal origin with slow undetected community spread somewhere and possibly random mutation that lead to more viral fitness in Wuhan.
---
What would actually change if you had certainty around one of these theories? Are you certain that there will not be a zoonotic viral pandemic in the future? If you aren't certain that there will never be a zoonotic pandemic again, then we should ramp up vector and disease surveillance.
Also, China has had no problem disciplining people that cause trouble and embarrassment. If they thought someone caused this, that person is fucking gone.
I don't think there is any way to get to a scientific certainty either positively or negatively about any of the origin theories; thus we should take precautions about all of them.
Widespread political support for ending all public funding of gain-of-function research or outright banning it.
What get's me is I'd support serious action against china because if its a lab leak they need to own that, and if it's from shitty food supply chain they need to own that too.
Also they're a shitty dictatorship, they're aggressive, they're genocidal etc.
People seem very enthusiastic to blame china for a lab leak, but have no enthusiasm to blame them for other mechanisms or to convert that blame into supporting action. It's a weird thing for my brain and I share this more as sharing my confusion to see if anyone else feels the same way.
I think you did a very nice job breaking down the many many uncertainties here btw.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outb...
>I wonder how many people who are seemingly willing to believe the self-serving CCP party-line on this, would be just as believing of the owners of a nuclear power plant in their town, once the drinking water became radioactive, claiming "it didn't come from the plant, someone else down the street must have done it" - that is just about as believable as this.
Absolutely sure the CCP are lying (I don't trust them either but that's not proof they're lying is it?)
Another comment here:
>I don't believe this to be true. I consider the likelyhood that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the cause of this to be much higher than that the seafood market in wuhan was the cause and there's no reason to trust any media or NGO to be truthful in that regard.
Literally "I don't believe the facts".
That's just this thread, on HN.
It's really concerning, or it was when I thought people could be self governing. /EdgyBS
And we're in the same place now.
Because people 100% believe things based on zero evidence.
Where is the fact in there? "China investigated itself and found themselves not guilty" does not make a "fact".
>there is no reason to trust any media or NGO to be truthful in that regard.
So if there are facts, you cannot believe them and OP doesn't.
And Second:
For arguments stake, let's assume that is correct and there are zero facts. So what can you conclude?
Nothing! It's possible there was a lab leak, it's possible there wasn't, we just do not know. That would be a fine conclusion.
So why has Op decided one possible conclusions is "much higher (probability) than" the others?
We don't know if there is a god or not. So concluding one particular religion is correct is dumb. The same applies to people claiming one theory or another is right re Covid Origins.
That is where the disregard for (lack of) facts comes in. If you don't know, you don't know; you don't get to decide with certainty what reality is because looking is too hard.
https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-neglected-g...
There's fleetingly little evidence of anything aside from a natural origin. This could be consistent with a natural virus collected at the WIV which subsequently escaped, but the multiple lineages at the market makes this extremely unlikely as well.
~ Eric Weinstein
This study seems to potentially shine some light on only the first item in that list, an outbreak at/near the wet market.
> One of the key findings of our study is that ‘unlinked’ early COVID-19 patients, those who neither worked at the market or knew someone who did, nor had recently visited the market, resided significantly closer to the market than patients with a direct link to the market. The observation that a substantial proportion of early cases had no known epidemiological link had previously been used as an argument against a Huanan market epicenter of the pandemic. However, this group of cases resided significantly closer to the market than those who worked there, indicating that they had been exposed to the virus at, or near, the Huanan market. For market workers, the exposure risk was their place of work not their residential locations, which were significantly further afield than those cases not formally linked to the market.
This makes sense, but it's probably not something I'd have thought of myself.
I also find figure 4[1] fascinating. Evidence points not just to the market, but to just a handful of stalls within it.
The sibling study tracks two lineages in the early spread, both clustered around the market. The first study, citing this sibling, says:
> This, along with the lineage A cases we report in close geographical proximity to the market in December, challenges the suggestion that the market was simply a superspreading event, which would be lineage-specific. Rather, it adds to the evidence presented here that lineage A, like lineage B, may have originated at the Huanan market then spread from this epicenter into the neighborhoods surrounding the market and then beyond.
They conclude that they are likely the result of separate animal-to-human transmissions and that there were probably more jumps that quickly died off. This suggests that the virus was well-suited to infect humans before it jumped:
> Successful transmission of both lineage A and B viruses after independent zoonotic events indicates that evolutionary adaptation within humans was not needed for SARS-CoV-2 to spread (49). We now know that SARS-CoV-2 can readily spread after reverse-zoonosis to Syrian hamsters (Mesocricetus auratus), American mink (Neovison vison), and white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), indicating its host generalist capacity (50–55).
[0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8337 [1] https://www.science.org/cms/10.1126/science.abp8715/asset/86...
Having said that, a case could be made that this (lab leak via market) is a distinction without a difference.
You don't remember correctly. The WIV is ~15km from the market and there are multiple other markets nearer the WIV if employees were regularly 'shopping.
They'd be fired for sure if caught.
They also would make almost no extra money... The going rate for bats isn't much...
I don't say that is what actually happened there, I just think that this would be one possibility.
Consider how things like hoof & mouth disease have ripped through agricultural herds in western countries, where there are much higher regulatory standards for food production. Diseases can spread fast before the symptoms become obvious.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Daszak
[2] https://www.harpercollins.com/products/viral-matt-ridleyalin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
However, we do not have access to the precise latitude and longitude coordinates of all these cases. Should such data exist, they may be accompanied by additional metadata, some of which we have reconstructed, but some of which, including the date of onset of each case, would be valuable for ongoing studies. We also lack direct evidence of an intermediate animal infected with a SARS-CoV-2 progenitor virus either at the Huanan market or at a location connected to its supply chain, like a farm.
Previously:
What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31866601
[flagged] More evidence that Covid-19 started in a market, not a laboratory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30566956
Book Review: “Viral” by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29764537
US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26125145
Frankly turning this on it's head, Russia should be applauded for pushing so many people toward green, renewable and truely economically viable energy sources, I nominate putin for the nobel peace prize based on his efforts here.
You're implying intent on his part. If any single person in the world would want renewables to never exist, it would be him. I also am aghast that you would feel this way about a man destroying hundreds of thousands of lives. The man is evil.
If this was required for most discoveries we'd have to recall a serious number of nobels...
Also if he's shutting down hundreds of throusands of biological co2 and methane factories isn't that further supporting the case?