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Comment by why_at | Hacker News Reader

Can you elaborate on point 4? Your comment is interesting but I don't entirely follow.

Basically, things like "It started in Wuhan near the WIV" implies that we actually have found the first case, etc., when this is notoriously difficult to do, especially with a disease that can have mild or asymptomatic presentation.

Doesn't the same difficulty of finding the first case also apply to the wet market theory?

Indeed, so it could be some unidentified third place. There are few labs and many other possibilities for people to come into contact with animals, so that third place was probably not a lab.

Yep.

My prior is that it is a zoonotic spillover event. Not necessarily that one, though there is some good evidence for it.

If you followed events at the time and the suppressed rumours from doctors in China end of 2019, the new illness began exactly around that area actually (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang etc).

There were no similar reports in another place on this planet. (Since 99% of other places do not have full control of media and many have better healthcare so if it happened it would be less likely to go unnoticed)

>no similar reports

Covid detected in wastewater samples

December 2019 in Italy: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7428442/

>November 2019 in Brazil: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.26.20140731v...

They found covid in samples of the sewage system in SC state Brazil in November. 2 months before it came out of wuhan

https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/saude/novo-coronavirus-ja-estav...

>March 2019 in Spain: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v...

Brazil recorded its first COVID death April 15, 2019. Initially taken as a data entry error by some, data for 2019 is still published nearly six years after the fact.

https://transparencia.registrocivil.org.br/dados-covid-downl...

Spain paper was not peer-reviewed.

November Brazil could happen because December is when rumours already circulated in China and October is when it was out in Wuhan already per your link.

April Brazil I don't know what to tell you, no sources support the wild claim that it was NOT a data error.

> 2 months before it came out of wuhan

Source? I bet it came out earlier. It was circulating in Wuhan before the pandemic according to WHO. Just people in China who are more likely to get infected are less likely to travel abroad (social class/sanitary conditions/etc) but maybe one person brought it out.

There was similar report about sudden increase of cases of atypical pneumonia at Oct 16, 2019 in Krasnoyark Krai, Siberia, Russia: about 700 cases per week, which is similar to Covid-19 levels.

The main database of samples and viral sequences of the Wuhan Institute of Virology went offline on Sep 12th 2019.

That's a smoking gun. And next month it was likely already circulating in Wuhan (https://www.reuters.com/world/china/first-covid-19-case-coul...), coincidence.

> A joint study published by China and the World Health Organization at the end of March acknowledged there could have been sporadic human infections before the Wuhan outbreak.

No, it doesn't. Quote from the article:

> Researchers from Britain's University of Kent used methods from conservation science to estimate that SARS-CoV-2 first appeared from early October to mid-November 2019, according to a paper published in the PLOS Pathogens journal.

Satellite images of Wuhan may suggest coronavirus was spreading as early as August 2019:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52975934.amp

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/08/health/satellite-pics-cor...

Would it mean it was active earlier but a critical mass was needed to cause a pandemic? Or it evolved in humans while circulating Wuhan?

I agree with that statement. Even with prior warning, and knowing the virus could be introduced only at an airport or seaport, Western public health authorities managed to trace approximately zero cases to their introduction. So it's hard to believe the same tools would succeed at the much more difficult task of tracing the very first cases in China.

That makes it odd that you're promoting an author who has claimed such evidence shows conclusively that spillover into humans--and not just a super-spreader event--occurred in the Huanan Seafood Market. I suspect that if you looked personally at the methodology behind the conflicted (Rasmussen's doctorate was under Vincent Racaniello, a longtime proponent of high-risk virological research) authors' claims, then you'd find them much less worthy of repetition.

I think her arguments are solid, I'm just not certain they're definitive. But I do find her presentation of those arguments to be both detailed and accessible.

You might not be certain they're definitive, but she is:

> There’s really no explanation other than that the virus started spreading in the human population at that market

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/13/angela-rasmuss...

The claim that the location of spillover can be definitively localized within hundreds of meters from epidemiological data is core to the predominant theory of natural zoonotic origin, from an overlapping set of authors including Rasmussen.

Theories of a research accident almost never assume such localization is possible, not least because the earliest known cases weren't particularly close to the WIV. (If anyone's claiming otherwise, they've probably confused the WIV and Wuhan CDC.) So it's odd that you'd correctly note the near-impossibility of that localization, but then cite that as evidence against unnatural origin.

This makes me think you haven't looked much in the details yourself, and two of your four points above are explicitly arguments from authority. If you did look yourself, then I think your assessment might change.

I believe these agencies may have other kinds of intelligence data such as satellite photos of the (empty?) Wuhan Institute of Virology carpark, spikes in mobile phone activity in the area etc. So assessments are made on more than just biological principles.

The hospital was full.

The institute would never be full.

There is no "bring your child to work day" in China.

Weird conflation, unlikely... uunless you mean to muddy the waters and sow dis-information.

I would argue you are sowing disinfo and I honestly dont know what point you are trying to make. Spikes and/or significant reductions in activity as indicated by external data sources, and particular the timing thereof, will obviously be very useful for determining the sequence of events.

The hospital, sure.

Why would Wuhan center being empty represent anything?

People don't rush to a random (unrelated) building when they get sick at the "market".

Coincidence, surely?

What are the chances of having a specialized infectious disease center next to where that type of disease spontaneously emerged?

More or less likely than a bat having sex with a panda possum?

No one, not even the cowardly academics, believed it.

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