[corty]

I would argue that there is a huge difference regarding the improvements in safety measures, depending on whether there is the suspicion or the proof of a lab leak.

With just the suspicion of a lab leak, there will always be half-measures because of researchers arguing that you are needlessly tying their hands. And there will always be people who believe them, either because they trust those researchers or because they don't want to spend any more money on safety measures.

With proof of a lab leak, nobody would listen to researchers' complaints about those strict safety measures anymore. And having seen the huge cost to society, the evaluation of cost and benefits of that research and its safety will be seen in a totally different light.

Also, having someone to blame would imho rally sceptics and deniers behind a common narrative. There would be a common external threat and a common enemy to fight, meaning that the means of that fight like travel restrictions and vaccinations would be more readily accepted.

[patentatt]

I see you’re first point, that’s probably accurate. But I think on the second point the common enemy to fight would quickly become the entire country of China (in the eyes of many in the US at least), and there would be massive public pressure for war, or antagonism of some kind (economic, political, social) that could escalate to war. And that has the potential to be much more devastating than the pandemic. So I think the first point you make about the merits of increased scrutiny have to be balanced against the dangers of potential war.

[corty]

We are already at 4 Million fatalities from Corona, with a probably significant unknown number of deaths in third-world countries without proper diagnostics and healthcare. Vaccinations are still going too slow and will take another 5 years to even possibly cover all humans. Within that timeframe, it is quite possible to approach WW2 levels of fatalities (around 80 mio.). Secondary damage due to hospitals being overwhelmed, imploding economies and hunger will come on top and are still not easy to estimate.

It would be appaling and immoral to let something of this magnitude go unanswered. If someone is responsible, they need to feel the consequences. Because the consequences of not reacting to something like this, and it getting out later, are far more serious and devastating: That would in one stroke wipe out all legitimacy of involved governments, leading to revolutions all over the west (and quite possibly the rest of the world).

[native_samples]

4 million with COVID, not because of. China would certainly point out that all COVID fatality data is confounded, e.g. the average age of death being above the average life expectancy in some areas. Given how a COVID death is defined, an entirely inert virus engineered to be spreadable but otherwise completely harmless would still be considered to have racked up a lot of deaths.

They would also argue that they aren't responsible for western policy responses, even if those responses were inspired by theirs. Things like hunger are a side effect of lockdowns and supply chain disruptions, not directly the virus.

The true number of deaths genuinely caused by COVID that wouldn't otherwise have happened is unknown and probably always will be. It's probably in the same general area as the 4 million figure, it wouldn't be 50% or anything, but really for a virus that so heavily affects the old and co-morbid you'd need to be calculating in terms of life years lost rather than concrete "deaths". It's the latter style of counting that has led to this mass confusion in the first place.

[jsnell]

The graphs for excess mortality track the deaths attributed to Covid quite well in most of the world. There's just no chance that it's some kind of an measurement artifact.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

The main exception are totalitarian states like Russia or China, where the numbers were either entirely suppressed or fabricated.

[native_samples]

What is "it" in that sentence? COVID deaths exceed excess deaths in quite a few countries, which doesn't make sense, especially given that lockdown measures create deaths through restricted healthcare access - look at graphs of hospital admissions right at the start or the now massive backlogs.

The Economist tables show this. Britain reports 10,000 more COVID deaths than excess deaths, and the over-count is surely much higher than that given that the healthcare system now has huge backlogs with people dying on waiting lists for non-COVID related diseases. Denmark also reports far more COVID deaths than excess deaths. Some of those are created by policy, and the proportion will only increase over time given the vaccines + generally screwed up health system.

Then there's the question of how excess is calculated. It's excess vs a model. What matters here is not really what's true but what China can argue is true. Modelling is discredited in the west now, in the unlikely event they cared to respond at all, they would certainly argue that any calculations of damages were based on motivated reasoning and bad modelling (and then present their own bad modelling in response).

[jsnell]

"It" refers to what you wrote, i.e. "Given how a COVID death is defined, an entirely inert virus engineered to be spreadable but otherwise completely harmless would still be considered to have racked up a lot of deaths."

That theory is obviously not compatible with the excess mortality graphs moving in lockstep with the Covid death graphs. If the virus has no correlation with deaths and it is all a mis-attribution, why would the pattern of deaths match so well with the pattern of excess mortality?

Excess mortality being a model rather than ground truth is irrelevant too. It still doesn't explain the correlation.