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Comment by shlant | Hacker News Reader

> For me it's just common sense

> Duh

This is the kind of argument one makes when they don't have an argument

It's so obvious that an appeal to common sense is all that's necessary. How many markets do you think are in China? 100,000? 1,000,000? And how many of those are within driving distance of the one lab where:

- They study novel coronaviruses - They sampled the same regions where the closest relatives to the virus were found - They applied to put a furin cleavage site in a coronavirus before the pandemic - They were cited in diplomatic cables for poor safety standards - The database containing records of the viral sequences was taken down right before the pandemic - A scientist working at the lab at the time of the origin disappeared - A scientist who patented a coronavirus vaccine a few months into the pandemic "jumped off the roof"?

Does a lab accident not immediately jump out as the obvious leading possibility to you?

'Common sense' says that the thing which has occurred periodically throughout human history (plagues and epidemics) completely naturally and is occurring around the same period after the last one ('Spanish' flu of 1918-20) would have the same causes as those before it, but with accelerated time frames due to ease of travel and population density.

There have been plenty of lab leaks in history too.

There have been more cases of 'almost epidemic but for action by health officials' with SARS and avian flu etc which makes it 'common sense' that these things occur pretty frequently and would be happening more often naturally if not for luck and structures in place to mitigate them. Those structures also happened to be dissolved by the US leaders in charge at the time, which seems to fit the puzzle.

So, 'things happened before' are heavily tilted towards 'nature did it' in any case.

So tell me, looking at history, of all outbreaks that have occurred within 20 miles of a biolab studying the same disease family, how many were zoonotic versus lab accidental?

My common sense doesn't have that information on hand. Sounds to me like 'common sense' is a terrible way to try to investigate complicated things, eh?

from the WHO in 2006, page 236 on SARS: "the risk of a laboratory source is potentially greater"

  https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/207501

That's great. I am countering the notion that evidence is not required because it is 'common sense'.

Actually you just said that common sense would indicate a natural origin, which was, at least in the case of SARS, just refuted.

No, I am saying that relying on 'common sense' is stupid because it can take you in any direction you want since you aren't going past a surface level evaluation. You just proved it by having to dig a little to try and refute my 'common sense' take.

>It's so obvious that an appeal to common sense is all that's necessary. How many markets do you think are in China? 100,000? 1,000,000?

This is why "common sense" is very often wrong and we have to refer to data instead. You're making assumptions that are very wrong.

The wet market was over 50,000 square metres in size and one of the largest in China. The idea that there are hundreds or millions of these things is completely backwards.

The conditions were unsanitary, animals were slaughtered on site, and large numbers of wild animals were sold.

This is exactly the sort of place you'd expect a zoonotic spillover event to occur. It was flagged beforehand as a danger site.

It's not impossible that it could have been a lab leak, but consider that this market had hundreds of thousands of animals being kept, slaughtered and sold, in unsanitary conditions, shitting and pissing on each other, bleeding everywhere and biting humans and each other.

Now compare that to a secure biolab holding a small number of samples whilst following biosecure protocols. Even if they weren't perfect, which environment provides the best chance of a spillover event?

Well, according to a quick search there are 40k wet markets in China. How big do you think the average wet market is? Even guessing 1000 square meters, which is very conservative, the wuhan wet market only represents about 0.1% of wet market square footage in China. By this back of the envelope math, the chance that a zoonotic spillover at a wet market would occur so close to the lab is less than 0.1%.

And sure, the wuhan market is a great place for a zoonotic spillover to occur, but any wet market would be, so the wuhan market in particular isn't the exact place you would expect. In fact I would expect it to occur at a market much closer to where the most similar viruses were found.

However, since the wuhan market is the enormous unsanitary market near the novel coronavirus lab, it is the exact place I would expect the first super spreader event to occur following a leak at that lab.

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