[boxed]

Of course there's a reservoir. That's why there was a lab in the first place. There are many more viruses in those caves. Many many. And tourists literally pay money to go into such caves, and look up to the ceiling to look at the bats. Bats that may at any time shit into their eye with one of these new viruses. And then on top of that people catch them and sell them live to slaughter them at home to eat.

Again, this is all well known and the reason the lab was there in the first place. That's why the techs go into these caves wearing full haz mat. Unlike the tourists who are oblivious.

Not saying it's not a lab leak. But you seem confused about some basics facts...

[skellington]

No there isn't. More than 50K animals tested an no animal reservoir for C19.

Are there really reddit-ors who still think C19 was natural when ALL of the current evidence including genetic markers points to lab leak?

Yes, we can't say with absolute certainty, but the case for lab leak is MUCH stronger than for natural. Plus, why has China still not released the nature and details of the experiments that were conducted in that lab? You know why.

Anyone who doesn't see that lab leak is the most likely source is just being contrarian for their own ego or political reasons.

[epakai]

Natural and lab leak are not exclusive. In fact we do have evidence for genetic markers being of natural origin. See the work of William Gallaher, 'A palindromic RNA sequence as a common breakpoint contributor to copy-choice recombination in SARS-COV-2'. As well as: https://virological.org/t/the-sarbecovirus-origin-of-sars-co...

The lacking evidence for a natural origin right now is just that a natural reservoir hasn't been discovered. The potential natural mechanisms for those genetic markers seem reasonably understood though.

[alevskaya]

This is a dumb argument. Sick animals were probably culled immediately by the farms to avoid getting blamed.

As a 2-decade genetic engineer: there are no genetic "markers" pointing to a lab leak, there's really no sign of unnatural manipulation in the sequence.

[DiogenesKynikos]

Indeed, the government cracked down on wild animal farming at the beginning of the pandemic.

When you hear that "X thousand animals were tested," it's not the types of wild animals that are the likely culprit. It's cows, pigs, sheep and the like. It's a complete red herring.

[naasking]

Passage through humanized mice wouldn't leave signs of unnatural manipulation. It's still pretty suspicious that COVID was so transmissible between people from the outset, and no evidence of it circulating in local populations was found.

[this-crap-sucks]

If it wasn't so transmissible, it wouldn't have been a pandemic.

[naasking]

The question was not "why was it a pandemic", yhe question is, why was it so transmissible when earlier outbreaks, like SARS, had relatively much poorer transmission? That's the typical profile of new viruses.

[yosame]

Spontaneous mutations mean that a virus can become more infectious by bad luck alone. We were unlucky.

[boxed]

A million deadly new viruses, and one breaks through. Finding exactly that one is kinda hard! But finding bats with multiple scary coronaviruses at the same time is trivial.

Staring yourself blind on this specific strain of coronavirus misses the forest for the tree (yes, singular tree). There's literally a forest of nasty shit out there and you're saying "but the scientists couldn't find this one specific tree when they went looking in the Amazonas". Of course they didn't. C19 is highly contagious in humans, not in bats. For bats it's just one out of a million things that don't bother them.

> Anyone who doesn't see that lab leak is the most likely source is just being contrarian for their own ego or political reasons.

I disagree. I think those who can't accept natural origins as a hypothesis underestimate the size and variation of the viruses out there in nature.

[seizethecheese]

You are arguing different things. There’s a reservoir of coronaviruses, but not exactly c19.

[Consultant32452]

Evolutionary theory SUGGESTS it is a lab leak. When a virus "makes the jump" from animals to humans, it tends not to be very good at first. Then, over time, the virus would evolve to get better and better at spreading among humans. You'd have likely years of the virus spreading fairly slowly. You know how each progressive strain has become more capable of spreading but less deadly compared to the generation before it? One would expect to have seen strains prior to alpha which would have been significantly less infectious.

Covid, conversely, was EXTREMELY good at spreading among humans right from the start. This experience coincides with the exact category of experiments we know were funded in Wuhan, which include using directed evolution to get bat corona viruses to be able to infect human cells. They literally trained these corona viruses to be able to infect human cells.

Is this definitive? Of course not, nothing is definitive.

If you're interested in how these types of coverups play out in the real world, I recommend investigating the 1977 influenza pandemic. 700,00 people died due to a Russian lab leak and the entire scientific community kept it a secret from the public because they didn't want to embarrass Russia during the cold war. It took 30 years for the scientific community to come clean.

[boxed]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu

Sounds like you're vastly overstating the confidence of the 1977 flu being a coverup.

[Consultant32452]

Wikipedia is not a good source.

The 1977 flu pandemic was unique because it killed the young more than the old. This is because the old people had been through the 1950s H1N1 outbreak and had immunity.

This study from 1978 shows that the 1977 flu was genomically very similar to the H1N1 from the 1950s. This strain vanished off the face of the Earth for 20+ years and then re-emerged largely unchanged. The odds of that are basically zero. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395678/?page=1

This 2014 report from the center for arms control and non-proliferation reveals that relevant scientists in the late 70s knew it was a leak but hid it.

https://armscontrolcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Esc...

As this paper reports, the academic community didn't begin to acknowledge the lab origin until around 2008 and didn't begin to do so in an official capacity (academic papers) until 2009. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/

[mwbajor]

So if a tech from the Wuhan lab on one of these expeditions, does that count as a leak?

[SV_BubbleTime]

It absolutely would.

I think the people so eager to say it wasn’t a leak are often strawmaning that the argument is intentional leak.

I don’t care if it was a 1 in a billion accident. If it happened, it did so at a lab doing gain of function research on coronaviruses, and that was being funded by money originating in the USA. So…

I think I know how to prevent the next global event that someone is surely working on.

[kcplate]

> I think the people so eager to say it wasn’t a leak are often strawmaning that the argument is intentional leak.

Exactly. But even an unintentional leak or accident carries with it a HUGE global political problem for the country where the pandemic appeared to originate. It could also carry with it problems for countries that may have funded such research too. Hence, denials and cover up activities start happening.

Frankly, this theory has staying power because countries and agencies have acted exactly like they are covering something up.

[lmm]

If "patient zero" was someone who was there in a work capacity and got infected while doing that, yes. If they were a tourist who happened to work at the lab then no.

[undersuit]

My pet theory is that one of the people who procure live samples for the lab was infected already from their most recent trip and they went to have some food at a local Wuhan market.

[goolulusaurs]

Well its been years, why haven't they found the reservoir yet then? They would obviously want to since it would prove that it wasn't a lab leak, yet as far as I know they haven't claimed to have found it yet.

[thamer]

One argument against the cross-species transmission theory is that Chinese horseshoe bats (the reservoir for SARS and possibly SARS-CoV-2) don't really live in Wuhan. They live mainly in the south of China, see for example this map[1] from the paper "Bat Coronaviruses in China"[2]. This is where SARS was found in the wild, and where it first emerged as an epidemic[3].

It's not impossible that it would emerge in bats in Wuhan and spread to animals and then humans from there, just not very likely. Of course we know very little about the start of this pandemic so it's possible that an animal was infected in the south and transported to Wuhan, but that would mean that it happened without producing cases along the way.

[1] https://www.mdpi.com/viruses/viruses-11-00210/article_deploy...

[2] https://doi.org/10.3390/v11030210

[3] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1118391

[mikeyouse]

They absolutely live in Wuhan, or at very least, 60 miles away from Wuhan.

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002326/how-chinas-bat-caves-...

We have a huge sampling error problem since SARS clearly came from Yunnan, so much of the research and characterization focus has been in the South -- but bats and bat coronaviruses are endemic to all of China. Hence the caution on relying on this type of thought-process to make sweeping conclusions.

E.g, just "ctrl+F" for Hubei in this paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7106260/pdf/mai...

[yibg]

Maybe because they are not easy to find? How long did it take to find SARS reservoir?

[weaksauce]

looked it up and it seems they found the source of SARS from 2002-2004 in 2017 so a bit over a decade.

[baja_blast]

Not true, it took them a few months. In this paper published in 2003:

> "Civet cats, a raccoon dog, and a ferret badger in an animal market in Gunagdong, China, were infected with a coronavirus identical to the one that causes SARS in humans save for an extra 29-nucleotide sequence" which demonstrated that these animals had a very close ancestral virus circulating within their populations.

Source: https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs.

You're mistaking ancestral origin with proximal origin. It took a decade to find the bat virus that infected the civet cats, but the intermediate host responsible for the spillover was found within months.

[stolsvik]

Source?

[SubiculumCode]

In general I am of the opinion that all species have a place in nature, but when it comes to bats, I tend to think that their especially high viral load and elevated metabolism makes them a breeding ground for pandemics and I wouldn't mind if they were eradicated. Other species can fulfill their niches in the ecosystem.

[meindnoch]

How moderate of you!

[SubiculumCode]

right? my "A Modest Proposal"