[divided]

Right, what I’m saying is we know <1% of virus types, and it’s reasonable to believe we know <1% of coronavirus strains.

The bats don’t need to be at all near the market, the theory is an intermediate host was in the market. A bat could infect the host population days prior or years prior. A long potential span of time.

It might be illustrative to look at MERS. They found camel populations >3,000 miles away from the outbreak with antibodies to MERS. One potential explanation is the virus doesn’t sicken camels and had been spreading in their population for a long time prior to transmission to humans.

Or we look to SARS. They did not find SARS in a bat population, but after 5 years of searching they did find a cave where all the building blocks existed. It was a couple provinces away from the outbreak. >500 miles.

So despite your beliefs, how many bats freely roaming the neighborhood may not actually be a much better probability analysis than flu viruses in Antarctica. /s

[arisAlexis]

Because the theory of intermediate host hasn't Led anywhere after 3 years but we know for sure and as a fact that experimentos with bat coronaviruses did happen 1km from epicentro, I don't get why people insist so much. I think it's more like "I hope it's not true" thing.

[mikeyouse]

No experiments with bat Coronaviruses happened "1 km" from the epicenter. WIV is 15km away.. so even if you were to believe it originated at the WIV, it's still odd why it took off at a seafood market 15km away instead of at the very busy campus or any market much closer to their research center.

[arisAlexis]

It's very clear that you really don't want to believe in the probability. You know nothing is 100%. If you assign 100% for no leak then your bias level is 100%. If you assign some probability then we just disagree on the probability level. Btw, people from the lab live there and shop there.

[mikeyouse]

Of course there's the possibility - but the probability surely changes if the "market right next to the research lab" actually turns out to be a 20-minute drive away, no?

For people in the Bay Area, this is roughly equivalent distance-wise to a conspiracy theory about an outbreak at Twitter's HQ started by an "adjacent" lab in the Upper Mission that actually turned out to be in Jack London Square in Oakland instead.

[arisAlexis]

Again, bayesian priors. If there are only 4 labs worldwide messing with exactly these viruses, the combinatorics of this happening 20km from one of those 4 is infitesimal.

[mikeyouse]

I'm bored of this debate that happens every time one of these charlatans releases a paper that grabs a bunch of headlines and is disproven two days later (as already has happened with the original in this thread).

But "This happening" needs to be defined for Bayes to be of any use. State clearly what you think happened and it can be judged, because as has been proven over and over again, the virus is of natural origin. So the proximity to a lab studying Coronaviruses isn't nearly as interesting given China's history with these viruses.

This is long but in my opinion, worth reading regarding the Bayesian probabilities that actually matter here: https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-neglected-g...