> Evidence suggest that patient zero was someone in the Wuhan market, around november 2019, and the SARS-CoV-2 genetic "signatures" where all found in wild animals for sale in that market.
You're just repeating the conclusions of papers that made ridiculous leaps of logic based on circumstantial evidence. For example [1], which is the likely source of the argument you're (mis-)remembering, bases this conclusion on:
1) case histories from reported, hospitalized cases, which were probably incorrect (i.e. they just assume that the cases they know about are, in fact, the first cases), being "geographically centered" on the market in December (not November) of 2019 [2].
2) positive environmental samples near animal stalls in the market, of which they found two strains.
Neither of which is dispositive of anything, and more an indictment of the motivated reasoning of the academic literature at the time than anything else. If you bother to read any of the subsequent analyses, you'll find that there are a bunch of different lines of evidence (genetic and case reports, at the least), pushing the date of the first infections well before December.
In short, the first/WHO case reports were probably wrong, the virus likely broke out earlier and was circulating in Wuhan before these samples were taken. If that's true, it wouldn't be surprising, at all, to find positive environmental samples in a food market, and the tortured logic of this paper would fall apart.
[2] Seriously. Not joking. Here's the "methods" they used for this oh-so-rigorous analysis:
> The 2021 WHO mission report identified 174 COVID-19 cases in Hubei Province in December 2019 after careful examination of reported case histories (7). Although geographical coordinates of the residential locations of the 164 cases who lived within Wuhan were unavailable, we were able to reliably extract the latitude and longitude coordinates of 155 cases from maps in the report
They then take this data and blend it through a kernel analysis, wave their hands, and voilá! This this The Science (tm) upon which your confidence is based.
...oh, and by the way: the market in question just happens to be right next to the Wuhan CDC, and a major city hospital [3]. Weird, right? I'm sure it's just a coincidence. Certainly nothing worth including in a putative "probability analysis" of geographic distribution.
Your guessing of my sources are wrong, thus your message is a strawman fallacy from beginning to end.
There are studies pre SARS-CoV-2 about coronavirus in natural environments (like bat caves), and they found motifs that we found also in SARS-CoV-2. Zoonotic infections are very common and specially for coronavirus, so it should be our first guess unless overwhelming evidence shows that the virus was originated in a lab (leaked or engineered).
Maybe it was a lab leak, but there is not stronger evidence for that, than for the zoonotic event.
Here is your bad science:
- H0: The origin is the lab.
- H1: The origin is a naturally ocurring zoonosis.
As evidence for H1 cannot convince you, you accept H0 without any proof. Great science! Problem is your H0 is wrong. H0 should be the most easy explanation, which is a zoonosis that has happened before thousands of times, and for which we have also evidence (you call it circumstancial, as this was a trial) like similar sequences found in bats nearby. You must get better evidence to prove the unusual lab leak hypothesis. Your H0 and H1 are reversed.
Well, I cited a canonical paper making the argument you're advancing, so if it's not that, then...
As for the rest of your comment -- oy, talk about a straw man fallacy. There's absolutely nothing I said that requires the false dichotomy you've presented between H0 and H1 (i.e. there are other plausible hypotheses that aren't as extreme as the ones you've presented). Also, I don't "accept" H0. I just can't rule it out.
> H0 should be the most easy explanation, which is a zoonosis that has happened before thousands of times, and for which we have also evidence
Neither hypothesis is easy (i.e. likely). Natural, human-optimized zoonosis is incredibly rare in viruses. Making humanized viruses in a lab, starting from natural viruses, is actually straightforward. But when one of the world centers for doing that kind of work, on very similar coronaviruses, was right there in Wuhan...
You provided no references, and you've made your claims in generally nonstandard terms. Given that, I don't think it's reasonable to criticize other users for guessing incorrectly what you meant to say.
> There are studies pre SARS-CoV-2 about coronavirus in natural environments (like bat caves), and they found motifs that we found also in SARS-CoV-2.
You're doing it again here, but I think you're probably referring to Andersen's Proximal Origin:
But nobody disputes that SARS-CoV-2 evolved mostly in bats; the question is whether its path from bats to humans included a trip through the lab. No genomic evidence can distinguish between a novel natural virus and a chimera of two novel natural viruses. As Davis Relman wrote:
> Some [that's Andersen] have argued that a deliberate engineering scenario is unlikely because one would not have had the insight a priori to design the current pandemic virus. This argument fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory—for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a logical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory
The disease might have already been global at that point, it doesn't exactly have conspicuous symptoms. Wuhan was a place where somebody thought of looking for anything unusual.
Doctors in Wuhan first identified the pandemic due to the unusually high volume of sick and dying patients, not by any sophisticated means. There's no public evidence that the WIV was involved in the initial discovery of the novel virus. Zhang Yong-Zhen was the first to publish a genome, in Shanghai.
If the disease had already been global, then retrospective testing of wastewater samples, nasal swabs obtained for other purposes like the Seattle Flu Study, banked blood, and other stored samples would have revealed that. There were some scattered claims that it did, but none that held up very well under scrutiny.
You're just repeating the conclusions of papers that made ridiculous leaps of logic based on circumstantial evidence. For example [1], which is the likely source of the argument you're (mis-)remembering, bases this conclusion on:
1) case histories from reported, hospitalized cases, which were probably incorrect (i.e. they just assume that the cases they know about are, in fact, the first cases), being "geographically centered" on the market in December (not November) of 2019 [2].
2) positive environmental samples near animal stalls in the market, of which they found two strains.
Neither of which is dispositive of anything, and more an indictment of the motivated reasoning of the academic literature at the time than anything else. If you bother to read any of the subsequent analyses, you'll find that there are a bunch of different lines of evidence (genetic and case reports, at the least), pushing the date of the first infections well before December.
In short, the first/WHO case reports were probably wrong, the virus likely broke out earlier and was circulating in Wuhan before these samples were taken. If that's true, it wouldn't be surprising, at all, to find positive environmental samples in a food market, and the tortured logic of this paper would fall apart.
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
[2] Seriously. Not joking. Here's the "methods" they used for this oh-so-rigorous analysis:
> The 2021 WHO mission report identified 174 COVID-19 cases in Hubei Province in December 2019 after careful examination of reported case histories (7). Although geographical coordinates of the residential locations of the 164 cases who lived within Wuhan were unavailable, we were able to reliably extract the latitude and longitude coordinates of 155 cases from maps in the report
They then take this data and blend it through a kernel analysis, wave their hands, and voilá! This this The Science (tm) upon which your confidence is based.
...oh, and by the way: the market in question just happens to be right next to the Wuhan CDC, and a major city hospital [3]. Weird, right? I'm sure it's just a coincidence. Certainly nothing worth including in a putative "probability analysis" of geographic distribution.
[3] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Map-of-Huanan-Seafood-Ma...