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Comment by cratermoon | Hacker News Reader

Have you considered the possibility that it first appeared in the vicinity of a lab that experiments on similar viruses is because if it had appeared elsewhere, there would have been no sufficiently-equipped lab to isolate it? This is the streetlight effect: you find things where you (are able to) look for them.

In other words, it couldn't have appeared somewhere far from a properly-equipped lab, because there would be no properly-equipped lab to detect it.

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SARS-CoV-2 came to the world's attention because so many people in Wuhan got sick that clinicians noticed the unexpectedly high volume of patients. No special skill in virology is required to detect that, and there's no indication that the WIV was involved in doing so; if you believe it was, please post a reference. The genome of SARS-CoV-2 was first published not by the WIV but by Professor Zhang Yongzhen at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre:

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3052966/chin...

Of course it's possible that the WIV had discovered the outbreak earlier by more sophisticated means, and the CCP has chosen to conceal this fact. I don't think it's even that unlikely, considering all the other early warnings they tried and failed to conceal (e.g., the reports from Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist unaffiliated with the WIV); but the question would then become why.

Plenty of virii have their origins traced to initial outbreaks where there are not labs.

Using this as a justification to not investigate the possibility of a lab leak is wishful thinking at best.

> Have you considered the possibility that it first appeared in the vicinity of a lab that experiments on similar viruses is because if it had appeared elsewhere, there would have been no sufficiently-equipped lab to isolate it?

You are essentially arguing for lab leak theory. Initially there was only one cluster of COVID and that was at Wuhan. That's why lab leak hypothesis is more plausible.

It was not the case that there were dozens of clusters all over the world and Wuhan lab was first able to identify the virus. Your argument would have _some_ validity if there are lot of clusters of outbreaks at the same time. But that was not the case. The initial cluster was only at Wuhan.

The initial cluster was found at Wuhan, because there's a lab there. We have no idea how many sub-pandemic clusters arose and fell before this particular mutation got into a population sufficiently dense and mobile to spread it.

Did you know that 1918 flu arose in Haskell County, Kansas, killed many, and then just .. died out? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC340389/

> The initial cluster was found at Wuhan, because there's a lab there

Citation needed. This seems hand-wavy at best. As a matter of fact, people were uncertain about disease itself [1]. I havent seen any article yet that asserts the fact that Wuhan cluster was detected because of the lab. Furthermore, Wuhan lab is a research lab. It's not some diagnostic lab that people go there to get tested for new variant of SARS viruses.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50984025

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