[alevskaya]

No one is arguing that the earliest known case on Dec 11 is when sars-cov-2 "began". We know it must be older than that. More recent reviews of chinese epidemiology don't mention the hubei patient, the Dec 11 case seems to be consensus earliest verified case.

And yes, for a data point of this importance a random environmental sewage PCR handled over half a year later is of dubious provenance. If you've never done a ton of environmental PCR work you'd be amazed how easy it is to contaminate everything, but whatever. Given how contagious sars-cov-2 is, if it really were present in Italy in early December... we'd probably have more definitive proof of it's presence much earlier than Jan 31.

[timr]

Ok, fine. We're agreed then: the virus was obviously circulating widely by December, which means in all likelihood, it could have been found in pubic places in Wuhan China. Like, say...a public market.

I'm not saying it had to happen that way, just that finding shreds of viral RNA in a market, in December, in Wuhan, is in no way dispositive evidence of the market being the origin of the virus -- any more than finding flu virus in the ball pit at a McDonalds means that the flu came from Ronald McDonald.

> And yes, for a data point of this importance a random environmental sewage PCR handled over half a year later is of dubious provenance. If you've never done a ton of environmental PCR work you'd be amazed how easy it is to contaminate everything, but whatever.

"They could have made a mistake, so I'm going to ignore all evidence which disagrees with my prior beliefs."

[alevskaya]

Millions of old people in dense cities turn out to be a fantastically sensitive instrument for detecting the presence of sars-cov-2 in a population. You’d have to explain nearly two months of cryptic transmission that left no hospital reports or verifiable samples…

You do realize these papers pointing to an international nov-dec timeline only -weaken- any link to WIV at all, and have in fact been heavily leaned upon by Chinese conspiracy theorists as evidence this disease has -western- origins?

[timr]

> You do realize these papers pointing to an international nov-dec timeline only -weaken- any link to WIV at all, and have in fact been heavily leaned upon by Chinese conspiracy theorists as evidence this disease has -western- origins?

Chairman Pooh? Is that you?

The CCP can fuck right off with this idiocy. Seriously. Nobody with half a brain is falling for it.

You don't get to suppress information and/or not look for it in the first place, then claim that the lack of information is indicative of something.