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Comment by garmaine | Hacker News Reader

There are cases in Wuhan which predate the wet market cluster. That appears to have been a super spreading event but not the origin.

The bats this disease come from we’re not being sold in the market at this time. They’re out of season. So already the theory is assuming a multi-animal hop (some other wild animal got in contact with a bat and got infected, then captured and moved a thousand kilometers to the wet market and killed).

Meanwhile the bio lab in Wuhan received a sample of infectious coronavirus just months prior to the earliest known case. Within a few weeks of the outbreak while China was still downplaying the disease, the central government passed a rushed emergency safety rules update for these labs, starts pushing back on requests for access, and using state media to throw out a bunch of crazy theories about external origin.

Anyone with half a brain can connect the dots.

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If it was within a few weeks of the outbreak, then it wasn't likely the cause. As seen in other countries, the # of cases takes a while to ramp up, and it wouldn't go from a release to a couple thousand deaths in such a short time span.

It was half a year earlier iirc.

The virus likely didn't jump from bats to human directly, there are intermediate hosts involved. The hosts could be from anywhere, like SEA, nobody can locate the particular host and the particular moment.

Connecting dots == You believe because you want to

Unless someone came with causal evidence that someone gets infected from the lab, it is only your belief and there is no way to prove it.

You can believe whatever you like, so do the others.

There is direct evidence of a similar disease outbreak in 2012 among miners who came in contact with bats in caves. Maybe even the same disease. It was being studied in the Wuhan lab.

The theory that there must be intermediate hosts is attempting to fit the natural origin theory to the evidence, not the other way around. It is perfectly capable of jumping straight to humans, but there is no way for it to make that jump in Wuhan at that time so therefore it must have come through another species. That’s the logic.

The open question is: are there cases even before those, and outside Wuhan?

We already knew by summer there were cases going back to October 19 in Italy, from saved sewage samples

Recently (3 days ago)

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210318185328.h...

Note that when the WHO team asked for similar wastewater samples from China, they were told the samples had been discarded:

> They had sought wastewater samples from central China to check if the virus could be detected in sewage from late 2019, but were told those had been discarded, per standard policy, after a month, said Dr. Koopmans.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-refuses-to-give-who-raw-d...

So while it's very likely that SARS-CoV-2 was circulating in Italy back in October, it's entirely possible (and likely, I believe) that it was circulating yet earlier in Wuhan; but the evidence to confirm or refute was destroyed.

And I'm replying to myself to note that the Italian study has also received an expression of concern. So "very likely" may be an overstatement, and if anything that further reinforces my point (that so far, there's no reason to believe SARS-CoV-2 was spreading outside Wuhan before it spread inside).

https://retractionwatch.com/2021/03/24/paper-claiming-presen...

It’s likely that this is derived from a pangolin virus. Pangolins are most definitely traded at Chinese wet markets.

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