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by seanmcdirmid
1553 days ago
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The best info we have is that it was a bio lab release, just an unusual transmission from wild bats to humans in a wild animal market. And really, for all the authoritarian power they seem to have, sanitation standards are shockingly low, and with their density, these kinds of things will keep happening until they basically go with Japanese level cleanliness standards. Given its situation, china really had no choice but to go with a zero COVID policy. If they tried to handle it like the Americans did, 10s of millions of people would have died, if not more (because their density is higher with lower hygiene standards, not a good combination). |
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That's not my understanding at all. My understanding is that there are two competing theories, neither of which there is categorical evidence for:
1. A bat coronavirus jumped to an unrelated species (e.g. pangolins) that were sold at the wet market. Which then jumped again to humans. But we have not been able to find a close viral match in the intermediate animal population.
2. A bat coronavirus was accidentally leaked from a lab that was known (they have published papers on the topic) to be studying and actively mutating in gain of function research bat coronaviruses.
To me 2 is much more likely. The idea that the epicentre of a coronavirus epidemic was ~100m from the only lab in China that studies these coronaviruses, but that the source wasn't the lab is preposterous. It's possible, but it seems like far too much of a coincidence to me.