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Comment by HumanReadable | Hacker News Reader

oh come on, there's much more basis than that. For starters, the lab was specifically working on coronaviruses!

I'm not saying it's definitely a lab-leak, but it strikes me as ridiculous to confidently claim it wasn't given the information currently available.

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Some amount of coronavirus research is very common in most BSL-4 labs. Coronaviruses are common, and are of particular interest to China in that region due to what happened with SARS only a decade prior.

It's really not much of a coincidence.

Yes, as mike_d explained, those specific bat coronaviruses occur in Wuhan, of course it makes sense to build a lab there, and, just as portrayed in Contagion, that the virus would jump over there. Correlation-causation fallacy.

> Yes, as mike_d explained, those specific bat coronaviruses occur in Wuhan

Source? AFAIK those bats coronaviruses were only found in caves in Yunnan, which is ~1300 km from Wuhan.

Is there stronger evidence than correlation==causation to point to the market instead? I think that's what sends most people down the conspiracy kick. You have two seemingly reasonable explanations for a thing, yet one is considered ridiculous.

The caves where covid is supposed to have originated are over a thousand kilometers from Wuhan, next to the Himalayan border. What a crazy coincidence that the bat traveled halfway across China without infecting anyone before it finally landed right across the street from the Wuhan Coronavirus Research Lab.

It's really not that crazy given that the first cases were in a meat market where wild animals were butchered and sold.

COVID-19 presents as being similar to the flu and at least at first mostly killed older people with preexisting conditions. It is entirely possible that SARS-CoV2 had been rampaging across the countryside for some time before reaching Wuhan and being detected there. HIV started spreading in West Africa but was only detected years later in LA and NYC after traveling through multiple island locations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rayford

According to the previous link, HIV may have been spreading on the US since the 60s.

I didn’t know that and would need to see a source. Wuhan is a major city so I just don’t know how many bats (of that specific type) live there. Also heard similar to the below comment that it was quite far away. Also seems they had just moved the entire lab to a different location. Jamie Metzl does a 5 hour podcast with Lex Fridman about it. I find his case very compelling as a layman. Not that it is definitely a lab leak, but that its obviously possible and baffling to dismiss as a real possibility.

For SARS-1 there was no lab in Guangdong and still a coronavirus that is found in bats 700 miles away wound up jumping to people in a dense urban center.

If you can explain how SARS-1 happened without a lab -- and you MUST be able to do this at the end of the day, because it really did happen -- then you can explain how SARS-2 happened and the lab was just a coincidence.

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