Thread

1. robmusial · 1791169542 · focus · HN ↗

   I literally just finished Annie Jacobsen's book 'Biological War: A Scenario' last week where the central plot point is an accidental release of modified form of pneumonic plague from a lab in Siberia. Very coincidental timing, especially since it made me wonder how often labs like these have accidents and we never hear about them because it is cleaned up without issue.

   1. petcat · 1791170758 · focus · HN ↗

      > made me wonder how often labs like these have accidents and we never hear about them because it is cleaned up without issue.

      Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.

      1. lumost · 1791171119 · focus · HN ↗

         I recently heard a scientist use a phrase something along the lines of “when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection”.

         We’ll never know if the lab in Wuhan originated the virus. But it is awfully strange that the first patients of a novel pandemic coronavirus were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus.

         1. jacobolus · 1791180431 · focus · HN ↗

            This is not an accurate description. The first identified patients were people working in or living near a "wet market" where (among other things) various wild animals were sold. It's plausible that someone was infected somewhere else and the market was only the site of a "superspreader event" (rather than the earliest jump from some other animal to humans), but further details are speculative, informed by indirect phylogenetic evidence rather than direct forensic evidence.

            It's not unusual/unexpected that there were labs working on coronavirus research in several major Chinese cities: the 2002 SARS outbreak, which began in southern China and caught researchers and public health officials off guard, led to significant investment in the study of coronaviruses.

            1. dualvariable · 1791182494 · focus · HN ↗

               It is very unlikely that the initial superspreader event of a pandemic would be in a wet market that would be the one place for an animal spillover.

               And when you look at the documented lab release of SARS-CoV-1, it killed the researcher's mother. If a lab leak happened, we would expect it to hit the people closest to the researchers at the lab who were infected, and the places they visited. Hitting only the wet market isn't very likely.

               The outbreak looks like a wet market spillover. The fact that it happened in the same city as WIV is an unusual coincidence, but if the virus developed in rural Hubei, it was likely it would spillover in Wuhan.

               1. kryogen1c · 1791197172 · focus · HN ↗

                  > The outbreak looks like a wet market spillover.

                  Zoonotic spillover is not a spontaneous 0->100 event, there should be a trail of intermediate hosts and adjacent infections that there is zero evidence of.

                  > If a lab leak happened, we would expect it to hit the people closest

                  thats not representative of sarscov2. People in the same household could fail to spread infection.

                  > Hitting only the wet market isn't very likely.

                  It didnt. There were early cases outside of the wet market.

                  > unusual coincidence

                  A novel coronavirus appearing outside a coronavirus gain-of-function research lab is not a coincidence. Id sooner believe it was a sleight of hand to cover for a terrorist attack.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.