A “Safety Emergency” Happened at Wuhan Institute of Virology in November of 2019
marginalrevolution.com
marginalrevolution.com
https://www.propublica.org/article/senate-report-covid-19-or...
Covid-19 Origins: Investigating a “Complex and Grave Situation” Inside Wuhan Lab
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377145
(31 points, 2 comments)
Alternatively, there are opportunists ready when presented with a reality
Here, it relies on damning China for having a vaccine ready so fast. China’s vaccine doesn’t work and their population is still susceptible to covid. They take a separate opportunity for just waiting for weaker strains to evolve and circulate.
It isn’t competence. There is no tree of plans. It is just reactions that seem beneficial at the time.
Who is they? I find it difficult to believe China's government is behind it. They a reversing course on their one child policy because they realize the collapse coming from their low fertility rate. Better yet, they introduced significant incentives in order to fix this rate. Their zerocovid policy is incidentally so crazy because they fear population decline.
Worse yet, this ongoing issue is exacerbating the huge wealth disparity of east-west in china and imminent peasant revolt is likely. China isn't in a spot where they want to do this.
I would certainly see it the other way. the USA was quite involved in the wuhan lab. The USA could certainly have been the 'they' though obviously this whole Meng Wanzhou and Huawei thing in Canada ties together with the winnipeg lab and chinese national sending viruses to wuhan.
The Chinese economy was not “crushed by Trump”.
Though if OP felt like making the case for willfulness with any type of elaboration or reference, that would be nice.
Shutting down ALL internal Chinese travel from Wuhan, but letting international departures - that did happen, after all the more the merrier, let the world share our misery. Additionally let our stooge at WHO keep parroting how air travel is safe and essential!
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/05/us/coronavirus-flights-wu...
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/04/us/us-wuhan-evacuation-fl...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/05/cdc-says-us-is-accepting-fou...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-usa/two-more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/us/coronavirus-china-trav...
https://www.reuters.com/article/china-health-britain/british...
https://www.vox.com/2020/1/23/21078325/wuhan-china-coronavir...
“Travel restrictions can cause more harm than good by hindering info-sharing, medical supply chains and harming economies,” said the World Health Organization director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152
12:18 PM · Jan 14, 2020 "Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China."
WHO waited full week to Jan 30 before declaring "outbreak meeting the criteria for a Public Health Emergency of International Concern".
It is all in the articles you linked.
> Shutting down ALL internal Chinese travel from Wuhan, but letting international departures - that did happen, after all the more the merrier, let the world share our misery. ...
implying China allowed the flights to leave so they can infect the rest of the world, when in fact China did stop international flights from leaving, but the US, UK governments lobbied hard for these repatriation flights due to their own domestic politics.
This is not speaking about lab-leak. That wasn't on the radar at all, at the time. Just the 'denial' in the beginning from the apparatshiks (globally), and then the panicked lockdown actionism.
https://chinamediaproject.org/2020/01/27/dramatic-actions/
(Loads slowly, give it time.)
https://www.propublica.org/article/senate-report-covid-19-or...
@dang perhaps replace the URL?
The intelligence of groups scales something like the inverse of Metcalfe's law. More people means more memetic mass repeating poor local optima, severely curtailing everyone's ability for rational thought. So in a large group the bandwidth to quickly converge on nuanced truths just isn't there.
We couldn't even get wearing a basic respirator, as demonstrated in countless movies about pandemics, to become accepted as common sense until 22 months into the pandemic. That's how paralyzed we were as a society. The last thing we needed was even more energy being dumped into jingoistic (and other zero-sum) red herrings rather than taking basic care of ourselves.
That’s not what happened. We didn’t shelve the discussion to focus on other priorities, we created a propaganda campaign to prohibit the discussion from taking placing and actively censored and stigmatized well-meaning individuals who explored it.
There’s so much condescension in the post-rationalization of these decisions. We couldn’t tell people that masks might not work, or that the virus may have come from a lab. Why? All it did was destroy the credibility of our institutions.
They're stuck in a death spiral too, cause admitting fault now would unravel years of digging themselves into a hole, insisting that they make no errors and if they do it's cause "the science changed."
You’ve hit on one of the biggest issues of the debate.
Early on many of the posts acted like if everyone got on board with a lab leak theory or if it turned out to be a lab leak, then we would be able to get back to normal and also the government would be blameless for their terrible prep.
Neither of those made sense. The virus could have been from a lab, from a meteor, from an angry pine cone god willing it into existence, or from evolution making a virus jump species. It wouldn’t effect the proper response or change the situation.
While the virus is still a concern, we’re out of the acute phase so now it’s appropriate for a retrospective cause analysis in order to prevent it from happening again. The start it would have served no purpose except distract from what actually needed focus.
Also, even today it seems almost moot whether it was from the market or the lab. That both are very plausible scenarios really should be enough to take appropriate measures for making sure neither could spawn a new one.
This has come up so often, but clearly, repetition must continue. Masks and mask mandates had no effect on COVID at any point. Even a cursory amount of time spent with the case graphs and start/end dates will show that to be clear. You simply cannot find inflection points in the case graphs that correlate with mask mandates being added or removed. The reason is, masking assumed SARS-CoV-2 spreads via large water droplets. The mask was supposed to catch these droplets if you were infected and coughed. But actually SARS-CoV-2 spreads like a gas, via invisible aerosols that can float in the air.
The article discusses this briefly:
Animal experiments to test the efficacy of vaccines generated highly infectious aerosols that are “difficult to detect,” the interim report says, adding that “there were concerns about conducting this type of research in a BSL2 laboratory.”
and
Two and a half months earlier, according to the interim report, procurement officials at the WIV posted a call for bids on a government website seeking a costly air incinerator. The post was dated Nov. 19, 2019, the very day that the visiting CAS safety official arrived to address a “complex and grave” situation there … If somehow the HEPA filter system failed, because there was a tear or breach … then your quick fix would be to bring in an air incinerator.
This was actually known from the start by people paying attention. The Diamond Princess cruise ship proved it. The whole ship was placed in lockdown, where people weren't allowed to leave their cabins, and the initial infections were also confined to quarters. Yet very quickly COVID was cropping up all over the ship despite the lack of contact. Therefore it must have been spreading via the air ducts as a consequence. This sort of thing was to be expected because SARS-1 was found by investigators in Hong Kong to have spread within an apartment building placed in lockdown via the drain pipes connecting bathrooms, and even between buildings, via aerosol spread. Search for "Environmental transmission of SARS at Amoy Gardens" to see.
The outbreak on the Diamond Princess revealed not only that lockdowns wouldn't work, but also that lots of people appeared to have prior immunity, somehow. Unfortunately even though this rather 'useful' outbreak happened very early on, the results were ignored by epidemiologists. The reason is fairly clear if you read their papers: they have developed a culture of ignoring inconvenient data and replacing it with assumptions. Epidemiology papers and models will routinely have dozens or even hundreds of assumptions in them, even about variables that have observational data available, and always to the same end of exaggerating both severity of an epidemic along with the ability to control it. Aerosol spread would have rendered epidemiologists entirely useless, as there's no known way to contain or reduce the spread of such a virus, so they'd have had nothing to contribute. Hence the replacement of observational data with the assumption of highly localized droplet spread, to which several different containment strategies could be applied.
> Your evidence for masks working is ... movies?
Not evidence. Graphical demonstration of common sense behavior by other humans that can be mimicked, because if someone is operating at the level of "masks don't work" or "a cloth mask will protect" then that is apparently what's needed. An individual doing a menial task of spraying paint or grinding metal and then blowing out black snot quickly understands the purpose of air filtration, but social media is a hell of a drug.
"Masks" having no effect on Covid isn't an indicator of much, because >90% of the population never wore real respirators that provided actual incoming air filtration. You're essentially beating the strawman of the people wearing cut up t-shirts to "protect others", which I agree was also dumb tribal behavior.
Putting it simply - why has air filtration been standard operating procedure in bio labs, long before Covid? The question about Covid specifically isn't some "yes/no", but ultimately an engineering problem of what type of filtration is effective.
Because doing so is not practical, all these "pro-science" people are divorced from reality, operating in some absurdly idealized world that doesn't account for whether a system is literally able to be practiced by normal people. Our evidence for whether it's possible is whether anywhere even close to a majority of people did over the course of the pandemic. Not even close.
If everyone had that kind of outlook, we'd still be living in caves.
And what really messed the respirator issue up was being completely fucked by politics. First the CDC lied to preserve supply for hospitals. Then the topic got politicized into two moronic camps of "masks don't work" and "wear your mask to protect others". What was missing was "protect yourself and your family by wearing a quality respirator". Personal responsibility used to be a bastion of the Republican party, but went completely AWOL for this issue.
FWIW a 3M 8293 is a P100, more comfortable than your run of the mill cloth or surgical mask, breathes cool and easy thanks to the check valve, looks basically the same as a common technical face mask, and only costs $10. Of course you have to know to look for these to even find them, and you're much less likely to do that when given a thousand reasons not to by competing choruses of ignorance.
Left-leaning people seem to have mostly decided that the answer is totalitarianism. That if people don't do what you want you have to dominate them with force & otherwise shame. That all-too-popular option is odious.
> Personal responsibility used to be a bastion of the Republican party, but went completely AWOL for this issue.
Oh ok. We should all tip-toe around afraid about whatever butterfly effect will cause harm to someone in the world. Let's make "the floor is lava" and "step on a crack and break your mother's back" a way of life.
Germany mandated FFP2 masks quite a while ago. They didn't have any effect there either, and that is exactly as expected. To repeat: these viruses can spread through drainpipes connecting apartments. They can drift on the air between buildings. They can be suspended for hours in rooms and hallways. They can spread through air ducts in living quarters whilst people sleep. It's obvious why masks of any kind had no effect given this fact, nor could they have done. You seem to be believing that if only everyone had worn a slightly tighter fit of higher grade mask, things would have been different. But, people aren't ever going to wear gas masks 24/7 including in bed and in the shower. That's the whole reason that even biolabs use filters integrated into the building, not strapped to people's faces.
That's why the idea you can fight respiratory virus epidemics with masks is just directionally wrong. You keep acting like this is the fault of the public, but it's just straightforward common sense given what the data says.
The bigger problem is probably not floor drains of course but air ducts, hallways and other building areas that expose the uninfected to aerosols hanging in the air in ways that masks won't affect because people don't wear them at home.
I get the impression from your other post you may have been making your family wear respirators, perhaps even at home. If so then yes, this message will be hard to hear, but it's not generalized stupidity amongst the population that we didn't all follow you in that. It's that the droplet model of spread was invalidated very early on and the immediate failure of mask mandates confirmed what was happening. Respirators with valves are especially incompatible with either model, and in fact got banned pretty early on where I live. You had to use masks without valves.
As I said, air filtration and biological isolation in general are engineering problems. The modern world is built on dragging problems into boring terms we can coldly analyze. What you're doing is jumping between red herrings and then coming to the conclusion that the problem is intractable.
The nonsense train continues with the strawman "you may have been making your family wear respirators, perhaps even at home". Obviously, at least if you're thinking prudently, you define your groups of people you have regular close contact with where transmission is likely a foregone conclusion. You don't take a public health recommendation to wear a mask, extrapolate that as if it's a suggestion to wear them at home in bed etc, figure that's ridiculous, throw your hands up, and then turn to Facebook for validation. Your quick jump to this apparent meme really just demonstrates how far from rationality you are.
[0] I also wasn't agreeing with it - I just don't see a reason to read it. Sure, I'll believe that can happen.
It's not hyperbole. Aerosols are very hard to filter and can even enter via the eyeballs. Maybe proper military grade gas masks can keep them out, I don't know, I don't think there's been much study of that. On the other hand good airflow seems more important. Very few cases were traced to planes and outdoor events.
"What you're doing is jumping between red herrings and then coming to the conclusion that the problem is intractable."
No, we never talked about whether the problem is tractable in theory. I started by pointing out that mask mandates didn't work. You then took the position that they would have worked if only everyone had worn respirators instead, which I pointed out is also wrong. Now you've moved the goalposts to some sort of theoretical exercise in which a solution might exist, one day.
Could we reduce flu and COVID levels by re-engineering existing buildings to have biolab-like air handling equipment? Probably! Was it possible to have done that during COVID itself? No. Is it reasonable to do that going forward? Very unlikely to have a good cost/benefit ratio, no.
"You don't take a public health recommendation to wear a mask, extrapolate that as if it's a suggestion to wear them at home in bed etc, figure that's ridiculous, throw your hands up, and then turn to Facebook for validation"
I never mentioned Facebook. I've been citing data from real world outbreaks and scientific journals, not memes from Facebook.
The public health recommendation to wear masks was in fact ridiculous given what was known at that point (and still is), because it could not have worked. In 2020/2021/2022 we do not have any way to stop a pandemic caused by an aerosolized respiratory virus. Maybe one day we will, sure. If you want to try and research ways to do that, go right ahead, but masks or respirators of any kind aren't going to play a part in a solution.
I've yet to see any indication that common N100 respirators are ineffective at removing most viral particles, even independent of droplets. The sizes are within the same realm, and the particle size N100's are tested at isn't some hard cutoff, but rather representative of a soft probability distribution.
Obviously being outside and distanced is better than being close to people with a respirator, but once again this is not an either/or. It's about mitigation of situations you have to go through.
If you're concerned about your eyes, full face respirators are available. It's ridiculous to throw up your hands and say because infection through the eyes is a possibility, doing anything else is pointless. Once again, viral load indicates the need for smooth probabilistic analysis rather than binary exposed-or-not.
FWIW I haven't argued that anything should be mandated. It seems like you're balling up many orthogonal issues together, and then attacking the whole ball, often with the most outlandish strawmen interpretation of them. I mentioned Facebook because clearly some kind of social media is supplying energy to these harmful memes that have put you at odds with basic reasoning and prudence.
In April 2020, Trump declared at a press conference that COVID-19 — or “kung flu,” as he soon began calling it — had come from a lab in China. When pressed on the evidence for this claim, he declared: “I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that.”
So he had been briefed with secret intel he wasn't allowed to repeat, probably NSA intercepts of some kind. And yet despite this clear statement, it was immediately censored all over the place by tech workers and others who thought they were better than the general public at knowing what's true and also better at it than a US President with access to secret intelligence reports.
That’s such an odd narrative. The major drug companies didn’t join warp speed, and the first western vaccine took 2 days to develop. The slow part wasn’t development it was clinical tests, and getting to market.
https://unherd.com/2021/05/how-facebook-censored-the-lab-lea...
Sadly we’ll now see even more “fact checking” thanks to the EU’s Digital Services Act.