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Comment by ChemSpider | Hacker News Reader

If the lab leak story is correct, the WIV people knew somewhere inbetween September...November 2019 that the virus leaked.

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Why is that true? I would think you could have an undetected leak.

The article claims multiple researchers got sick. I mean, we can posit that this wouldn't ring any alarm bells... but if they have any competence at all, it should've rung some alarm bells and resulted in more testing. And if we'd developed tests for this in November, it wouldn't have been spreading undetected for months.

That’s not true, a leak could occur without them realising. Getting cold and flu symptoms in winter wouldn’t raise too many suspicions.

Given they didn’t start any containment procedures either they didn’t know or that’s not how it happened

The article doesn't just say "people got sick" it says that researchers were hospitalized. That doesn't sound like "normal seasonal illness" to me.

Then you haven’t spent time in China and realise they use their hospital system very differently. Often people will go to hospitals for minor fevers.

Yep, can confirm this took me by surprise when working with chinese colleagues in our company. Eg. I would read someone's out-of-message saying "OoO, going to hospital today" and be freaking out. But then they would be just out for couple days sick leave for fever or something. Only after like 3rd time that happening it clicked to me that 'hospital' for them means something completely different than I would have thought.

Whether that is just a misunderstanding of language or actual difference in healthcare system I never thought about.

"Hospitalized" normally refers to staying at the hospital, not just visiting the ER, though it is a bit ambiguous.

So typically they have a "fever ward" and you will go there and receive an IV of Tylenol or something similar. I would be surprised if they didn't call that "hospitalisation". You are admitted, given a bed, a chart... not sure what else you'd call it.

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