[TomSwirly]

> Do you truly believe it is a realistic scenario that a virus this infectious could traverse from northern Italy to Wuhan, Hubei, without creating multiple infection hotspots along the way?

Sure - I'm not quite sure what the issue is.

A single person X becomes infected mid-week in Europe. Monday they leave for China. The next Thursday, they have a business meeting in China where they are symptomatic but have suppressed obvious symptoms with OTC cold medication - who wouldn't if you flew thousands of miles for a meeting?

A dozen people sit in a room in Wuhan with some infected person for several hours.

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> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

An "extraordinary claim" is along the lines of UFOs, ghosts and goblins.

There are hundreds of millions of international passengers a year. That an unknown infectious disease could travel from Europe to Asia undetected is hardly an "extraordinary claim".

Pending any hard evidence at all, it can only be described as a hypothesis.