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Comment by goolulusaurs | Hacker News Reader

IMO, it seems obvious from the behavior of China's government that they know it is a lab leak. If it wasn't a lab leak, then presumably there is an animal reservoir of the virus somewhere in China, but as far as I know they haven't claimed to have found it. But if there is an animal reservoir of the virus in China, then how could the Chinese government ever expect a lockdown to work? A lockdown on travel would only really prevent the virus spreading from people bringing it into the country but obviously wild animals would still be spreading it. Yet the Chinese government claimed that their lockdowns did work. How is that at all compatible with the virus being from wild animals and not being a lab leak? It doesn't make any sense.

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There are other Chinese government behaviours also. If it wasn't a lab leak why not publish the Wuhan labs database which was public until the outbreak? I know they say hacking but they could just make a copy and upload it somewhere. Also after Xi's first speech on covid his civil servants put out instructions to improve biosecurity at the virus labs. And lots of little things that seem a bit odd.

The only counterpoints are a) China is highly insular and rarely plays ball on even basic stuff and b) the whole Chinese idea of "saving face" where even when a person in power obviously messes up you still don't take the Western "brutally honest" approach, you do the opposite and pretend everything is still normal out of 'respect' (and in protection) of the person's social standing. The consequences happen quietly behind doors.

China not playing ball is like saying "I won't even give such a suggestion my time, how dare you ask me that".

That said - I fully agree it would have done leagues to help the narratives if they did play ball. Hell, the suggestion is that it was an accident in the first place. That should say enough on it's own if it's true.

> the Western "brutally honest" approach

Yeah, not so much these days, and probably not ever to extent that you may have meant it. Western folks are learning pretty quickly how well total reality denial has been working for... other regimes.

I am going to say Trump, but if I'm going to do that then I also need to mention an absolute procession of Western political and business leaders. Biden, Obama, Bush, Bush, Clinton, Abbot, Turnbull (he denied mathematics for god's sake), Morrison, Blair, Jobs, Ellison, Gates, Hoover, and so many other names I cbf remembering or looking up.

In fact, I think the "brutally honest" approach is exceedingly rare and always has been, in any arena in any hemisphere.

I was talking about the contrasts with western culture as a whole. Not petty national-level US political discourse via their pet D.C. reporters.

Does no one else on earth remember the initial videos out of China of people laying dead on the streets? Does no one else remeber the WHO refusing to acknowledge Taiwan is its own state?

I really struggle that anyone is seriously buying a single “truth” that is coming out of China.

I don’t know it was a lab leak, but I agree, if you are at all reasonable you can just see that China thinks it was.

I remember viral videos of big halls and hallways full of spastic people strapped into their beds. I still wonder sometimes what that was all about. Who had an interest in spreading such videos? What outcome did they hope for / get?

Maybe it was a poor attempt at trying to spur action without saying more than they were "allowed" to?

To me the whole idea of "China knew" is an oversimplification. Even if it was a lab leak, given the insane stakes, I can't imagine a majority of the Chinese government, or even a sizable portion of their own government would ever learn that.

People in China may have known and tried to do "something" without being able to outright say what the world (and even their own country's people) was about to be dealing with

> But if there is an animal reservoir of the virus in China, then how could the Chinese government ever expect a lockdown to work?

Because if people avoid contact with the animals and it's a rare type of human-animal interaction to begin with, then it doesn't spread. And if you catch it again, you lock down instantly locally again.

I'm not taking any side on the source of the virus, but I don't think the Chinese government behavior makes either option more likely. Once vaccines had been developed, the Chinese lockdown went on for way longer than reason could ever have dictated, since Covid had turned endemic in the rest of the world. The extreme lockdown was never a good example of rational health policy in any scenario, post-vaccine.

Sure, but don't they have a vast network of contact tracing? Presumably if a bunch of cases showed up that weren't connected to any other cases because of the lockdowns then that would be a really good indication of where the animal reservoir was located. But they haven't found the animal reservoir yet either, even with all of the lockdowns.

If by 'animal reservoir' you mean the intermediary pangolin, or something similar, this 'reservoir' could be as small as 1 animal if it was a spontaneous mutation. Where do you get the idea that there must be a large population of such animals roaming around?

Wasn't the intermediate pangolin idea also discredited as exceedingly improbable relatively early in the pandemic?

Can you link to a source?

No, I can't, that's why I'm asking a question about it.

As far as I can tell authoritative source has ever made an on-the-record comment along those lines. But then again it's impossible to prove a negative.

> it seems obvious from the behavior of China's government that they know it is a lab leak.

I don't think anyone in China knows what happened.

It seems entirely likely that it was covered up at multiple levels until it couldn't be. And that each level won't know about the other cover ups.

I think it's entirely possible that the system in China doesn't have the capacity to know.

Similarly, they probably covered up the death toll by not counting. So it's entirely likely that the Chinese government doesn't know the true number.

> Yet the Chinese government claimed that their lockdowns did work.

Why would the be a correlation between what the "Chinese government says" and reality.

Of course there's a reservoir. That's why there was a lab in the first place. There are many more viruses in those caves. Many many. And tourists literally pay money to go into such caves, and look up to the ceiling to look at the bats. Bats that may at any time shit into their eye with one of these new viruses. And then on top of that people catch them and sell them live to slaughter them at home to eat.

Again, this is all well known and the reason the lab was there in the first place. That's why the techs go into these caves wearing full haz mat. Unlike the tourists who are oblivious.

Not saying it's not a lab leak. But you seem confused about some basics facts...

No there isn't. More than 50K animals tested an no animal reservoir for C19.

Are there really reddit-ors who still think C19 was natural when ALL of the current evidence including genetic markers points to lab leak?

Yes, we can't say with absolute certainty, but the case for lab leak is MUCH stronger than for natural. Plus, why has China still not released the nature and details of the experiments that were conducted in that lab? You know why.

Anyone who doesn't see that lab leak is the most likely source is just being contrarian for their own ego or political reasons.

Natural and lab leak are not exclusive. In fact we do have evidence for genetic markers being of natural origin. See the work of William Gallaher, 'A palindromic RNA sequence as a common breakpoint contributor to copy-choice recombination in SARS-COV-2'. As well as: https://virological.org/t/the-sarbecovirus-origin-of-sars-co...

The lacking evidence for a natural origin right now is just that a natural reservoir hasn't been discovered. The potential natural mechanisms for those genetic markers seem reasonably understood though.

This is a dumb argument. Sick animals were probably culled immediately by the farms to avoid getting blamed.

As a 2-decade genetic engineer: there are no genetic "markers" pointing to a lab leak, there's really no sign of unnatural manipulation in the sequence.

Indeed, the government cracked down on wild animal farming at the beginning of the pandemic.

When you hear that "X thousand animals were tested," it's not the types of wild animals that are the likely culprit. It's cows, pigs, sheep and the like. It's a complete red herring.

Passage through humanized mice wouldn't leave signs of unnatural manipulation. It's still pretty suspicious that COVID was so transmissible between people from the outset, and no evidence of it circulating in local populations was found.

If it wasn't so transmissible, it wouldn't have been a pandemic.

The question was not "why was it a pandemic", yhe question is, why was it so transmissible when earlier outbreaks, like SARS, had relatively much poorer transmission? That's the typical profile of new viruses.

Spontaneous mutations mean that a virus can become more infectious by bad luck alone. We were unlucky.

The virus becoming more infectious over time is exactly my point. That's typical. What's not typical is the virus already being so infectious right from the start. Normally a zoonotic transfer circulates poorly in the human population before it mutates to become more infectious for the host. COVID-19 was already excellent at infecting humans from the earliest points we've found. That's very, very unusual.

A million deadly new viruses, and one breaks through. Finding exactly that one is kinda hard! But finding bats with multiple scary coronaviruses at the same time is trivial.

Staring yourself blind on this specific strain of coronavirus misses the forest for the tree (yes, singular tree). There's literally a forest of nasty shit out there and you're saying "but the scientists couldn't find this one specific tree when they went looking in the Amazonas". Of course they didn't. C19 is highly contagious in humans, not in bats. For bats it's just one out of a million things that don't bother them.

> Anyone who doesn't see that lab leak is the most likely source is just being contrarian for their own ego or political reasons.

I disagree. I think those who can't accept natural origins as a hypothesis underestimate the size and variation of the viruses out there in nature.

You are arguing different things. There’s a reservoir of coronaviruses, but not exactly c19.

Evolutionary theory SUGGESTS it is a lab leak. When a virus "makes the jump" from animals to humans, it tends not to be very good at first. Then, over time, the virus would evolve to get better and better at spreading among humans. You'd have likely years of the virus spreading fairly slowly. You know how each progressive strain has become more capable of spreading but less deadly compared to the generation before it? One would expect to have seen strains prior to alpha which would have been significantly less infectious.

Covid, conversely, was EXTREMELY good at spreading among humans right from the start. This experience coincides with the exact category of experiments we know were funded in Wuhan, which include using directed evolution to get bat corona viruses to be able to infect human cells. They literally trained these corona viruses to be able to infect human cells.

Is this definitive? Of course not, nothing is definitive.

If you're interested in how these types of coverups play out in the real world, I recommend investigating the 1977 influenza pandemic. 700,00 people died due to a Russian lab leak and the entire scientific community kept it a secret from the public because they didn't want to embarrass Russia during the cold war. It took 30 years for the scientific community to come clean.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu

Sounds like you're vastly overstating the confidence of the 1977 flu being a coverup.

Wikipedia is not a good source.

The 1977 flu pandemic was unique because it killed the young more than the old. This is because the old people had been through the 1950s H1N1 outbreak and had immunity.

This study from 1978 shows that the 1977 flu was genomically very similar to the H1N1 from the 1950s. This strain vanished off the face of the Earth for 20+ years and then re-emerged largely unchanged. The odds of that are basically zero. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395678/?page=1

This 2014 report from the center for arms control and non-proliferation reveals that relevant scientists in the late 70s knew it was a leak but hid it.

https://armscontrolcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Esc...

As this paper reports, the academic community didn't begin to acknowledge the lab origin until around 2008 and didn't begin to do so in an official capacity (academic papers) until 2009. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/

So if a tech from the Wuhan lab on one of these expeditions, does that count as a leak?

It absolutely would.

I think the people so eager to say it wasn’t a leak are often strawmaning that the argument is intentional leak.

I don’t care if it was a 1 in a billion accident. If it happened, it did so at a lab doing gain of function research on coronaviruses, and that was being funded by money originating in the USA. So…

I think I know how to prevent the next global event that someone is surely working on.

> I think the people so eager to say it wasn’t a leak are often strawmaning that the argument is intentional leak.

Exactly. But even an unintentional leak or accident carries with it a HUGE global political problem for the country where the pandemic appeared to originate. It could also carry with it problems for countries that may have funded such research too. Hence, denials and cover up activities start happening.

Frankly, this theory has staying power because countries and agencies have acted exactly like they are covering something up.

If "patient zero" was someone who was there in a work capacity and got infected while doing that, yes. If they were a tourist who happened to work at the lab then no.

My pet theory is that one of the people who procure live samples for the lab was infected already from their most recent trip and they went to have some food at a local Wuhan market.

Well its been years, why haven't they found the reservoir yet then? They would obviously want to since it would prove that it wasn't a lab leak, yet as far as I know they haven't claimed to have found it yet.

One argument against the cross-species transmission theory is that Chinese horseshoe bats (the reservoir for SARS and possibly SARS-CoV-2) don't really live in Wuhan. They live mainly in the south of China, see for example this map[1] from the paper "Bat Coronaviruses in China"[2]. This is where SARS was found in the wild, and where it first emerged as an epidemic[3].

It's not impossible that it would emerge in bats in Wuhan and spread to animals and then humans from there, just not very likely. Of course we know very little about the start of this pandemic so it's possible that an animal was infected in the south and transported to Wuhan, but that would mean that it happened without producing cases along the way.

[1] https://www.mdpi.com/viruses/viruses-11-00210/article_deploy...

[2] https://doi.org/10.3390/v11030210

[3] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1118391

They absolutely live in Wuhan, or at very least, 60 miles away from Wuhan.

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002326/how-chinas-bat-caves-...

We have a huge sampling error problem since SARS clearly came from Yunnan, so much of the research and characterization focus has been in the South -- but bats and bat coronaviruses are endemic to all of China. Hence the caution on relying on this type of thought-process to make sweeping conclusions.

E.g, just "ctrl+F" for Hubei in this paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7106260/pdf/mai...

Maybe because they are not easy to find? How long did it take to find SARS reservoir?

looked it up and it seems they found the source of SARS from 2002-2004 in 2017 so a bit over a decade.

Not true, it took them a few months. In this paper published in 2003:

> "Civet cats, a raccoon dog, and a ferret badger in an animal market in Gunagdong, China, were infected with a coronavirus identical to the one that causes SARS in humans save for an extra 29-nucleotide sequence" which demonstrated that these animals had a very close ancestral virus circulating within their populations.

Source: https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs.

You're mistaking ancestral origin with proximal origin. It took a decade to find the bat virus that infected the civet cats, but the intermediate host responsible for the spillover was found within months.

Source?

In general I am of the opinion that all species have a place in nature, but when it comes to bats, I tend to think that their especially high viral load and elevated metabolism makes them a breeding ground for pandemics and I wouldn't mind if they were eradicated. Other species can fulfill their niches in the ecosystem.

How moderate of you!

right? my "A Modest Proposal"

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9

It took years to discover the location for the SARS bats. China is large, undeveloped and has lots and lots of bats.

But it took months to find the intermediate host: Paper from 2003 finding the virus that spilled over into humans in an animal sampled in the market https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs.

There are many autonomous aspects of China.

Just like we in the US have 6 federal agencies doing separate investigations barely sharing anything and coming to different conclusions.

Despite Beijing’s absolute power over everything there, the National Standing Committee has lots of people to please too and thats just in Beijing. There are provincial governments and stuff too.

Rules for rulers.

IMO also it is obvious. And that was before a friend told me that his wife, who worked with the lab director, said it was a lab leak and that the Chinese govt had ordered all the lab notes destroyed.

I agree. But I still don't think it adequately explains why the Chinese lockdown effort was so much more intense than everywhere else's. That is, unless they also know something about its function that the rest of the world doesn't know.

Lockdowns serve a purpose: to slow the spread of the virus.

Lockdowns serve many purposes, not simply the stated one. They also have many side effects.

That’s not what china was doing though. They were attempting total elimination.

Exactly. How can a zero transmission rate be anything else?

Also to give people time to develop the vaccine for the virus. Lockdown until the vaccine is administered to the community is a sound policy.

It took over a year to deploy the Covid vaccines. You want people to lockdown for 1-2 years when a new outbreak happens?

Depends on your goal. If you want to minimize deaths then you don't have a lot of options. If you want to maximize profit then letting people just die is cheaper, assuming you aren't counting medical expenses.

Locking people up for a year is probably going to cause many other problems that will lead to early deaths, so I don't see that as necessarily a good way of minimizing deaths. We're already seeing that Covid has disrupted many aspects of peoples' social lives, probably leading to a decrease in the birth rate, for instance, plus causing other health issues like depression.

Just letting the disease run rampant doesn't necessarily maximize profit either: if all your workers get sick and a bunch of them die, that's going to cause a huge impact on your profits, even in the relatively short term, let alone the long term when there's a labor shortage and a decrease in demand.

You would be hard pressed to find more than a handful of deaths attributed to "being in lockdown", especially when compared against the 6.5 million extra deaths from COVID.

Economists tend to see workers as replaceable cogs, so deaths aren't a major factor until it starts affecting the labor supply. To maximize income in cases like this the best strategy is to get your entire workforce sick at once, take the two weeks off, then hire enough people to replace the 5% that died so you can get back to work as fast as possible. Also, make sure to suspend all health benefits for the two weeks to make sure nobody tries to use expensive hospital stays. You probably think this sounds extreme, but it's a real strategy (apart from suspending health insurance) that some powerful people were very angry about not being able to implement due to government interference.

-1 clueless downvotes and 6 clueless replies.

If you can’t understand that slowing the spread (exponential growth factor) in a pandemic is priority number 1, and can’t understand that lockdowns serve that purpose then take up knitting or pottery or something and stop commenting on pandemics.

China is a highly population dense country with incredible means of public transit, and millions of people moving back and forth every day: these factors all serve to increase the exponential spread of the virus. Slowing the rate of infection helps reduce hospital and equipment overload, gives more time to develop a vaccine, and increases each individual’s chances of survival when they do become ill.

^ If you can’t understand the above then pottery and knitting.

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