[ShannonLimiter]

> 1) Understanding the origin doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic

I have the opposite opinion.

If there was a lab leak and a coverup, this meant that the Chinese government likely knew earlier and had more information about the nature of the virus and how it spread. That could have saved millions of lives.

We spent the first several months of the pandemic under the belief that it wasn't airborne. This ended up being false.

If this was a lab leak, it means that this kind of research is far more dangerous than we've been lead to believe and continuing without appropriate safeguards puts us at great risk.

[snowwrestler]

> If there was a lab leak and a coverup, this meant that the Chinese government likely knew earlier and had more information about the nature of the virus and how it spread. That could have saved millions of lives.

The lesson here is not “we need to prove it was a lab leak,” the lesson is “we need better visibility inside China.” Which is also true for viruses that arise naturally inside China.

Do you think that if you could prove with total certainty that it was a lab leak in 2019, that would change China’s approach to secrecy in the future?

> If this was a lab leak, it means that this kind of research is far more dangerous than we've been lead to believe and continuing without appropriate safeguards puts us at great risk.

Do you think we can stop secret viral research in China if they want to do it?

One of my frustrations with the “lab leak theory” is that it seems to cause fuzzy thinking about future preparedness.

We can’t control other nations and we can’t stop natural viral evolution. Future preparedness is the same as past preparedness: detect and respond. We just did a bad job of it with COVID-19. The lesson is: do a better job.

[ShannonLimiter]

> The lesson here is not “we need to prove it was a lab leak,” the lesson is “we need better visibility inside China.” Which is also true for viruses that arise naturally inside China.

The WIV was conducting research with US financial and technical support. The lab in question regarding a potential leak was funded in part to look for early signs of outbreaks.

If there was a lab leak and it was inadvertently caused by this lab, would you suggest that we continue to fund and provide support with no changes?

> One of my frustrations with the “lab leak theory” is that it seems to cause fuzzy thinking about future preparedness.

I can't speak to what you've seen elsewhere, but future preparedness should involve more transparency, safeguards that samples are being tested with the right safety levels and actual independent oversight.

It seems crazy to continue funding a bad faith actor without those conditions.

[SV_BubbleTime]

> Do you think we can stop secret viral research in China if they want to do it?

We could probably start by not funding exactly that, not sending our scientists there, not openly exchanging these processes and techniques with them… if they aren’t going to be reliable and upstanding stewards.

[peteradio]

> We can’t control other nations

Really? Is diplomacy dead? I guess you can probably say "we can't absolutely control other nations" but nations don't even absolutely control themselves.

[snowwrestler]

Exactly, there is no way to reliably prevent work with dangerous infectious agents across the entire globe.

[rdl]

Airborne was always known; debate was droplet vs aerosol (particle size and thus dwell time/radius). Not really a binary distinction anyway; a matter of degree.

[timr]

I agree it's not binary -- and the SARS CoV2 debate, in particular, became a theater of the absurd -- but the categorical distinction is not entirely crazy: some viruses are much more sensitive to drying out or exposure to the environment and simply cannot transmit efficiently in tiny aerosols.

Tons of work has gone into weaponizing smallpox, for example. It's a non-trivial thing, even though smallpox is technically already a virus that transmits via aerosol. Many viruses will exist in saliva, and will happily transmit through direct contact, but won't transmit well via the air (mononucleosis comes to mind).

[rhino369]

A fair large degree though. However, as I understand it, it wasn't a misconception unique this particular coronavirus. But that the entire medical field just had a longstanding, bad understanding of dynamics. So its not like the Wuhan lab was sitting on some crucial information, they almost certainly had the same misunderstanding.

[ChemSpider]

> Airborne was always known

In the early days China even claimed even that this thing is NOT contagious - and yet they already started isolating patients at this time.

[ironmagma]

> the World Health Organization said that there is not sufficient evidence to suggest that SARS-CoV-2 is airborne

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00974-w

[rdl]

Ah yeah, you are right, airborne is defined as "aerosol" but "through the air in droplets" is not.

It seemed pretty obvious it was aerosol but not proven early on/suppressed for reasons.

[ironmagma]

I think it’s a textbook example of poor science communication. The words of science do not mean to the public what they mean to scientists. Further, it’s safest to assume the worst in a situation like that. I think they should have erred on the side of “assume it’s airborne.”

Unfortunately, special interests (hospitals and other medical groups) had an incentive (security of their own access to masks) to mis-state the facts.

[kaitaincps]

In the first few months the focus was heavily on spread via fomites. The value of masks was dismissed.

[lamontcg]

> If there was a lab leak and a coverup, this meant that the Chinese government likely knew earlier and had more information about the nature of the virus and how it spread.

You're assuming that the lab "designed" it like a new vehicle engine complete with horsepower and torque specs.

Even given it was produced in a lab through chimeras and serial passage then they still wouldn't have known what they had. They wouldn't have known its characteristics in a human population. They wouldn't have known how long its incubation period was, or when peak symptoms and peak transmissibility happened, they wouldn't have known its virulence, or its R0 in a human population or pretty much anything. They'd might have receptor binding assays against the human ACE-2 receptor. That knowledge and $4.25 will buy you a latte, but it won't predict the trajectory of a pandemic.

And why aren't you annoyed at the coverup that China is doing of its zoonotic origins and that China isn't cleaning up all of the trafficking in live animals like palm civets and racoon dogs? We know SARS-CoV-1 happened, and there was no BSL4 lab to blame it on, so it was definitely zoonotic, yet still fairly unexplained, and nothing serious was done to prevent it from happening again. Now the US is blaming the WIV lab and China is feeding its domestic population propaganda about how the US did it, and still nothing is being done to address the mechanism that we know created SARS-CoV-1. There's still a known virological time bomb there that nobody is doing anything about.

And the reason why China wants to cover up the zoonotic origins and kick the can down the road is that it can use the lab leak theory to push the domestic propaganda that the US did, along with avoiding the political costs of clamping down on the animal trade. And there will be a political cost to doing that. Imagine if in 2009 that the H1N1 pandemic happened in a US pig farm and was 100 times worse, and then Obama tried to ban bacon to prevent a future pandemic.

[ikiris]

I'm going to be blunt here. No one with medical training thought this wasn't airborne.

[bragh]

Funny then how for the first few months of the pandemic the emphasis and public guidance was on desinfecting hands and surfaces and endless debates about how if masks actually help.

[leppr]

I distinctly recall a virologist on public television early in the pandemic saying the hands and surface disinfection rituals were for psychology. He was not recommending masks either because there weren't enough to go around for everyone.

The debates about masks in the west, even after production ramped up, were a consequence of the initial confusing messages from officials. I've never seen it debated in Asia where they had masks available from the start.

[jpgvm]

As a resident of Asia I can tell you that people were wearing masks in late-January 2020, as soon as the outbreak was apparent in Wuhan.

This wasn't the first rodeo for SE Asia, scars of past pandemics has made the response here much more automatic, orderly and effective.

I think also supplies of masks etc were much more robust here because they were already worn in daily life due to pollution, normal sickness, etc and a massive medical tourism industry that was about to be shutdown and have their supplies made available.

[propagandist]

That was deliberate disinformation in order to save masks for the "frontline workers". Fauci has stated that in one of the hearings.

[daveevad]

I'm not sure that is correct. In a subsequently FOIA'd email, Fauci told a colleague on February 5, 2020.

> Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection.

[LordDragonfang]

That's a well known fact about how masks work in general, yes. They have a large effect on transmission from the wearer and a comparatively small effect in preventing transmission to the wearer.

However, when you have a limited supply of masks, it's impossible to give them out to every potentially-infected person, so saving them for high-risk people (like healthcare professionals, who also have the highest risk of becoming infected themselves) is still rational.

[Izkata]

Only with droplet spread. Once we're in the realm of aerosol spread, as with SARS-CoV-2, you need N95 filters or better to stop them. The virus just goes around or through the cloth masks everyone was wearing.

[epgui]

It wasn't disinformation. It was no secret that one of the reasons masks weren't recommended for general public use was that hospitals and clinics should be supplied as a priority.

If you got a different impression than this message, blame wherever you get your news from.

[pseudo0]

What, the US Surgeon General? https://archive.ph/KgfXW

> Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!

> They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!

It's hard to get more direct than that. It wasn't just about preserving supply for healthcare workers, high-level government officials were explicitly stating that masks were not effective for the general public.

Fortunately we have archives of all this stuff, as many statements (like this one) were later deleted.

[epgui]

That sounds 100% compatible with what I wrote.

You will also note that in the early pandemic, it was completely unclear that non-N95 masks, such as surgical masks (let alone cotton masks) would have a positive benefit. That changed later on, of course.

That statement reflected the best information available at the time, but it was designed to be as simple and actionable as possible, not to communicate highly-technical nuance.

[ssully]

Seriously. I can find social media posts of friends in April of 2020 sewing cloth masks to donate to hospitals/medical clinics to help them backfill their mask shortages.

[jcrash]

Multiple sources in USA claimed masks were not needed for people without the disease. Heavily implying it was useless.

I of course knew that was BS from the get-go. But nonetheless they did say it.

https://time.com/5794729/coronavirus-face-masks/

[runnerup]

That was the worst strategy the administration could have used.

[ikiris]

No one competent has debated that masks help.

[ironmagma]

> “Seriously people - STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus“

- Jerome Adams, former US Surgeon General, M.D.

[Lionga]

The German authority's namely RKI said they do not help for a long time. Until they flipped 180

[kaitaincps]

Correct.

[rhinoceraptor]

The communication at the beginning was that it was only spread through respiratory droplets, so therefore the combination of social distancing and cloth/surgical masks would be sufficient.

Airborne/aerosol transmission was only acknowledged by the WHO and CDC in May of 2021, over a year after the pandemic was declared. And taking that long to acknowledge it makes me think it wasn't just a strategic lie to preserve the supply of respirators for medical staff.

[nicoburns]

That was debunked here on HN right from the start though. And this is hardly a specialist medical community. I think the parent is right in asserting that the medical community knew this all along. Probably they didn't know for absolute certain, but it was considered highly likely. And that then got spun into a confusing message by the media. The WHO and the CDC were useless, but plenty of medical bodies around the world did much better than them.

[dekhn]

CDC updated its site in Oct 2020 to acknowledge airborne spread. There is still something of an argument in the scientific/medical community about what "airborne" means. A lot of folks lived through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Philadelphia_Legionnaires... which is scary because if there's just another infected person in the building, they can infect people far away!

and when the initial scientific articles about COVID air spreading (https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0764_article) came out, many policy makers were truly terrified of making announcements that would cause worldwide panic.

[themgt]

July 10, 2020:

The new coronavirus is likely spreading through the air to some degree, the top U.S. infectious disease official said on Friday, one day after the World Health Organization urged further studies on the ways the virus is transmitted.

“Still some question about aerosol but likely some degree of aerosol,” Anthony Fauci, the head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said by video during a panel session at a COVID-19 conference organized by the International AIDS Society.

Fauci on Thursday had said it was a “reasonable assumption” that airborne transmission was occurring even though there was not a lot of solid evidence behind it. The WHO urged more studies on the issue.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-meetin...

[shadowgovt]

> That could have saved millions of lives

But that still doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic. That's coulda-woulda-shoulda reasoning.

[_aavaa_]

Of course it does. It will impact other countries relationships with china. And it would impact the kind and level of scrutiny over this kind of research.

[corrral]

> It will impact other countries relationships with china. And it would impact the kind and level of scrutiny over this kind of research.

I think the point is that neither of those would have had an effect on the pandemic. By the time it was major news in the US, it was too late for any of that to matter in terms of what to do about this pandemic. Not the next one, or our future relations with China, but with this pandemic.

[_aavaa_]

A) I guess I interpreted "consequences" more generally to also include the consequences beyond the disease itself.

B) I still believe that it would have been important. If it escaped from a lab, then those working in the lab could potentially have important information to share with the world about it. E.g. is it airborne, how much does it mutate, etc. They would have been studying it for a reason.

[shadowgovt]

The fact that information never saw the light of day should be obvious evidence it didn't come out of a lab.

[_aavaa_]

Based on what implicit assumption? That a government would allow that information to be published? Look at how cagey and not forthcoming the Chinese government was under the current conditions.

Try to extrapolate to what they would act like if it did leak from a lab.

[friedman23]

This pandemic was raging inside China for months before it reached the US. What the Chinese government did by not allowing international observers and researchers and preventing the spread of information DID result in millions of lives lost. We could have had the vaccine available MONTHS in advance.

[eric_cc]

> If this was a lab leak, it means that this kind of research is far more dangerous than we've been lead to believe

Even if it wasn’t a lab leak, it could have been. So whether it was or was not should not change your opinion about the danger of this type of research.

[Ekaros]

I really have to ask. Did we really not have any idea how corona viruses spread before? If so, what other virus families we are unaware now and why aren't we spending lot of money to prepare for all of them?

[stetrain]

I meant the consequences and response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2021.

Of course there are longer term and big-picture consequences if it was a lab leak. Which is why I said it was important to research and understand the origin. I just get why it wasn't top priority during the actual pandemic response.

Edit: And of course there are geopolitical implications. I think the same point applies, at the time the focus was on the response and avoiding inciting a political battle over something that wouldn't have a near-term benefit.

[thenayr]

What...literally everyone knew there was AT LEAST airbone risk of infection. Not sure where you got your pandemic information?