If you’re at home and you hear loud booms, then look at the calendar and see it’s July 4, the date “explains away” the thousands of other explanations for why you are hearing loud booms.
The bats don’t need to be at all near the market, the theory is an intermediate host was in the market. A bat could infect the host population days prior or years prior. A long potential span of time.
It might be illustrative to look at MERS. They found camel populations >3,000 miles away from the outbreak with antibodies to MERS. One potential explanation is the virus doesn’t sicken camels and had been spreading in their population for a long time prior to transmission to humans.
Or we look to SARS. They did not find SARS in a bat population, but after 5 years of searching they did find a cave where all the building blocks existed. It was a couple provinces away from the outbreak. >500 miles.
So despite your beliefs, how many bats freely roaming the neighborhood may not actually be a much better probability analysis than flu viruses in Antarctica. /s
For people in the Bay Area, this is roughly equivalent distance-wise to a conspiracy theory about an outbreak at Twitter's HQ started by an "adjacent" lab in the Upper Mission that actually turned out to be in Jack London Square in Oakland instead.
But "This happening" needs to be defined for Bayes to be of any use. State clearly what you think happened and it can be judged, because as has been proven over and over again, the virus is of natural origin. So the proximity to a lab studying Coronaviruses isn't nearly as interesting given China's history with these viruses.
This is long but in my opinion, worth reading regarding the Bayesian probabilities that actually matter here: https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-neglected-g...
What if they’d done that multiple times?
“Bias” isn’t relevant when it comes to calling out bad actors.