[peteradio]

Not really wanting to play devil's advocate too much longer ... but if this virus popped up in let's say Spain rather than China wouldn't we wonder how the fuck it got there, what's the vector? I'm not sure if these things can be fingerprinted, would intelligence anyway trace it to China? Perhaps (to China) a clear oops backstory is more preferable to a murky "this thing definitely came from China but how?" backstory.

[saberdancer]

So the solution to that is to make it extremely suspicious by releasing the virus in Wuhan, city far away from the bat caves where they have a virus lab and which isn't really well known for outside travel?

Wouldn't it be much more logical to release it in one of the southern cities, Hong Kong or Macau. Hong Kong would be a perfect candidate as it would allow China to institute strict lockdown in the city which had decent amount of protests in the past years.

[DonaldFisk]

> if this virus popped up in let's say Spain rather than China

It may well have:

Coronavirus traces found in March 2019 sewage sample, Spanish study shows: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-...

Sentinel surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater anticipates the occurrence of COVID-19 cases: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v...

(SARS-CoV-2 was also detected in blood samples taken in Italy in September 2019: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03008916209747... )

> wouldn't we wonder how the fuck it got there, what's the vector?

Apparently we wouldn't.

There are two possibilities: either the virus really was circulating in Spain in March 2019, or the result is a false positive. I'm still waiting for either confirmation, or a retraction of the paper. Why the lack of curiosity?

[collyw]

Given that it took a year for the virus to have any effect in Spain, then all of a sudden it was very intense, wouldn't it be more likely that the test was botched?

There are a lot of false positives with PCR (0.8 - 4% according to this article https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...), so that makes a lot more sense than the virus being more or less dormant for a year then going wild.

[DonaldFisk]

> wouldn't it be more likely that the test was botched?

That's what I want to find out. From what you just wrote, the probability the test result is correct is at least 96%. But, as the result is so surprising and the tests aren't 100% reliable, it should still be checked.

You shouldn't assume it's a false positive simply because it doesn't fit in with our current understanding. Maybe our current understanding is wrong.

[collyw]

"Then they ran tests on samples taken between January 2018 and December 2019 and found the presence of the virus genome in one of them, collected on March 12, 2019."

If they did 100 samples you would expect between 1 and 4 false positives. (It doesn't go into detail about how many, but it's clearly more than one).

[collyw]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZoKM7zOUnU