[cdolan]

Did I just read this correctly? “janitor steals a highly modified and virulent bat and sells it for $10 in a wet market”

Why reach so hard to link this to a Wuhan wet market vs a generic leak? They didn’t sell bats at the market as far as I have read, and what’s the difference? Lab leak is a lab leak.

[dmix]

Indeed, you don't need such a complicated theory. 3 doctors researching a coronavirus end up in a regional hospital, but before they get ID'd with a virus they interact with others in the local community helping it quietly spread among people with stronger immune systems.

It's a 45min drive between the Hunan market <> WIV building:

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/30%C2%B022%E2%80%B235%E2%80%...

[awb]

It’s definitely plausible, but then wouldn’t you expect multiple outbreak sites?

* In and around WIV

* In and around the scientist’s homes, families and neighborhoods

From the news I’ve seen all of the initial known cases were traced back to the market.

[Vecr]

Not necessarily. If you look at the nature of superspreading events, it's quite often confined to a single site as opposed to infecting people they meet as they travel. In addition, most of the transmission comes from a minority of infected people, look up "overdispersion".

[awb]

> Lab leak is a lab leak.

It’s an interesting question though. Working off of a lab leak theory, how did the first known cases all come from the wet market?

Is it just coincidence that an infected scientist traveled to the outdoor market and infected others?

With human to human transmission, you’d think it would have spread more rapidly among a scientist’s friends & family in an indoor setting.

When the US was doing contact tracing early on, I think the number of outdoor transmissions was extremely low.

[philliphaydon]

We are told that they visited the market. But in reality it doesn’t make much sense why a busy wet market produced only a couple of covid patients.