[zibzab]

There was another one in France a while back. I understand the political implications of this (namely that Covid19 probably did not originate from Wuhan after all)

But given that we only seen 2 samples among millions, could this simply be an error? Like test errors, mislabelled or the sample being infected at a later point?

[smt88]

I don't know why you think this means it didn't originate in Wuhan. It just means it was outside China earlier than we've thought.

We already know the CCP suppressed research into the virus and blocked news of its spread early on. There's no reason to believe them when they tell us the date they discovered Covid.

[rich_sasha]

> I understand the political implications of this (namely that Covid19 probably did not originate from Wuhan after all)

I do wonder (honestly, not rhetorically), if the virus emerged somewhere outside of China, what are the odds of the first major outbreak being in Wuhan? Why did we not see major outbreaks elsewhere at the same time?

Perhaps the presence of cases outside of China this early on simply means Covid was simmering, and spilling out, earlier than we thought.

[blagie]

Well, a few explanations I can think of:

1) Covid19 was circulating, but had it's first outbreak in Wuhan due to things like population density

2) Covid19 was circulating earlier than China informed the world know (I'm not claiming grand conspiracy here to keep things secret; the simplest explanation is China didn't figure out what was happening for a while)

3) There were other coronaviruses with the same or similar proteins elsewhere.

I'm leaning towards #3. It makes a heck of a lot of sense for a lot of things unexplainable with SARS-COV2. If there was a mild cold circulating similar to SARS-COV2, but less deadly and less contagious, it'd explain a lot of the epidemiology (for example, why waves break so early, rather than infecting 70-90% of the population).

[tremon]

the simplest explanation is China didn't figure out what was happening for a while

It's even simpler than that: there was no need to figure anything out. If a few people present with flu-like symptoms but appear to suffer above average from it, Occam's conclusion would be that those people may have had an underlying condition that exacerbated the severity of their flu. There is zero need to go looking for zebra's until you identify a cluster of similar cases that all have above-average severity.

[Cthulhu_]

> Why did we not see major outbreaks elsewhere at the same time?

It's a difficult question to answer (and ask?), and we may never find the real answer. Coincidence, chance, luck?

For now though, for all intents and purposes, Wuhan was ground zero and the first public cases in Italy and - I don't know, possibly these ones in Norway - can be traced back to Wuhan.

[martini333]

The Norwegian study found covid antigen in 98 out of 6520 samples.

[jsnell]

Those 6250 samples were mostly from 2020, and the positive samples were almost entirely late 2020. Only one of the positives was from December 2019.

[zibzab]

Ah, you are correct. IIRC the French study was a single sample.

On the other hand, I feel 98 indicates a wide spread in Norway and probably in whole Europe. But that doesn't match the picture we had in EU around January-February.

[estaseuropano]

This is an insane proportion and the virus would have been picked up much earlier in a place like Norway which does lots of testing and flu sampling.

[dotancohen]

98/6520 is about 1.5 percent. What is the false-positive rate for the antigen tests? Have the affected blood samples been verified by PCR testing?

[rsfern]

It’s most likely too late for PCR confirmation with these samples, there would need to be actual viral proteins in the blood sample, so an active or very recent infection at the time of the blood draw

[martini333]

No idea. But 98/6520 is more than 2 out of millions.

[egberts1]

and a lot closer to 1 out of 650.

[netsharc]

These findings aren't smoking gun evidence that "Covid19 probably did not originate from Wuhan after all".

The rumor of the "new pneumonia" was going around between doctors in Wuhan in November 2019 [1]. It's conceivable that there were people who travelled from Wuhan to Europe in November/December, and that the virus was actually in Europe before it was officially found.

Of course it could've come via humans from somewhere else to Wuhan (a good scientist doesn't dismiss hypotheses), but for sure the first outbreak was there.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7378494/