This isn't entirely true, though. SARS-CoV-2 is much less virulent than SARS or MERS.

For a virus that recently crossed the zoonotic barrier, and even moreso for one crossing from bats, it's virulence is actually astonishingly low.

Therefore, the hypothesis of a two-stage crossing to humans, from bats to a larger land based mammal and then to humans is much much more likely, because this would explain high transmissibility due to the necessity to infect despite small lung volumes, as well as much lower virulence.

Therefore, the pre-existing hypothesis seems to match reality more closely than an accidental release. A virus being engineered to be an order of magnitude less virulent seems unlikely to say the least.

> A virus being engineered to be an order of magnitude less virulent seems unlikely to say the least.

From what I gathered it’s not suggesting specific genetic traits were engineered, but rather that they were experimenting and one of those experiments could have accidentally been released(?).

Yes, but is the theory is that one experiment, in the context of a gain analysis, was made in order to see how the virus might evolve to be much less severe?

Why would a gain analysis try to find ways in which a virus could be made weaker? I don't doubt that an accidental release is feasible, though very very unlikely, but why would an experiment make a less severe virus in the first place?

>Why would a gain analysis try to find ways in which a virus could be made weaker?

To better understand the mechanisms that make it weak or strong?

Plus, why would it have to be "made weaker" as opposed, accidentally made weaker? If they were experimenting they would have all sorts of varieties/results... it's not like every experiment to make it stronger would make it stronger... surely some could fail and make it weaker!

If I were to make a great bio weapon that would do the maximum damage, I will have these attributes: 1. Spread it easily; 2. Don't kill the ones who spread it most easily (the young); 3. Be lethal enough to overwhelm the system. And so I have the Covid-19. Of course it is all post-fact analysis. but it also answers your question of why would an experiment make a less sever virus in the first place - to address the biggest problem of an infectious agent as a bioweapon, i.e. a virulent virus ends up killing too many too fast to be highly infective and 'effective'.

And if I were to make a bioweapon, I would think about long-term impact.

(1) Millions disabled is far worse than millions dead.

(2) Attacks can come in multiple pieces. The first virus might do damage to make people especially vulnerable to the second virus. If I can protect my population against the first one /or/ the second, my people are safe.

My opinion is it's just a matter of time before we see bioweapons, and we should be ready. If not before COVID19, then now. Our vulnerability is very obvious.

We should treat this as an emergency prep drill, and make sure businesses can operate remotely, kids can learn remotely, we have PPE, and the infrastructure is in place for essential work. That also wouldn't collapse the economy.

Infectious bioweapons are a horrible idea in a highly connected world for the reason we can all plainly see: they don’t respect national borders.

It is an old-fashioned notion of a weapon that only made sense when there was little exchange between the citizens of states in opposition, like the U.S. and USSR.

China, for whom international trade is a crucial part of their strategy, would not work on an infectious disease weapon unless they simultaneously developed a vaccine to protect their own people. The fact they are not currently vaccinating their population, or even in the lead in developing a vaccine, is extremely strong proof that COVID-19 did not originate as a Chinese bioweapon candidate.

Not a proof at all. It just shows that it can't be a planned release.

If a lab in China had been working with this virus at all, they would have had at minimum working cultures of it, and potentially multiple strains and experience modifying them. Cultures alone would have put them ahead of western pharma companies in developing a vaccine—even in the case of an unplanned release.

The fact that they’re not ahead is compelling proof that this virus was as new to Chinese medicine as it was to everyone else.

> The fact that they’re not ahead is compelling proof that this virus was as new to Chinese medicine as it was to everyone else.

I appreciate your argument, but are you sure that they are not ahead? I don't have personal knowledge, but (for example) there was a Reuters article last week with a headline that included that claim "China leads COVID-19 vaccine race": https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-.... If somehow it was proved that they are indeed ahead, would you consider this compelling proof in the opposite direction? I think I'd consider both directions to be weak evidence, but neither to be anything near proof.

They are ahead by a few weeks, yes.

If there is a country that benefited most from this virus, it's Russia. Crippling economies of China and especially US (with additional misinformation to make people not wear masks).

Why would a country that wanted to deploy a bio weapon started on it's own land? It's not like travel to other countries was restricted.

Also Russia is not a country that would have qualms about affecting own citizens. Putin get to power by coordinating bombings on apartment complexes and blaming Chechens for it.

Well, let's break down this hypothetical a bit more:

(1) "Work on" is different from "release." If I were China, I would not release a bioweapon, but I might work on one. The US and USSR worked on nuclear weapons but did not release them. There are 200 nations. Some of them almost certainly have secret bioweapons programs.

(2) As China showed, they could handle a COVID19-level bioweapon attack while the US can't. US has several times as many /dead/ as China had /infected./ In a war, if I were China, I might release one too if I had one.

(3) If I were planning a sneak attack, as I said, a multipart bioweapon might make sense. If something like COVID19 damages the lungs, and makes people vulnerable to PICORNA21, and only 80,000 of my citizens caught COVID19, while millions of Americans did, it seems pretty safe. Especially if I know I can do another lockdown, and the US can't. Release PICORNA21, lock down, wait for millions of paralyzed Americans, and take my rightful spot back in the world.

(4) China is not the only player. Bioweapons are rapidly moving into the range of clever undergrad students, not to speak of terrorist organizations, rogue nations, etc.

I'm not trying to badmouth China here. I don't even think China is the major threat; just that the US should be ready for something like COVID19 intended as a weapon.

Also, as points of fact: (a) China is vaccinating its military already. (b) China has no reason to vaccinate its population yet; their lockdown has worked. If China did vaccinate their population already, as you point out, that would be clear proof this was engineered by China.

You missed out one critical element of a highly contagious bioweapon: you have to be able to protect your own population. Otherwise it's a self-own.

(This is why nobody has really used bioweapons in warfare to date, with the exception of some questionable reports that the USSR had a really lethal weaponized smallpox strain on some of their ICBM warheads, as a balance-of-terror multiplier.)

While this doesn't prove that COVID19 isn't a bioweapon, it strongly suggests that it got loose long before whoever designed it anticipated. Unless, of course, it was developed by the world-leading Vietnamese biological warfare institute (hey, look at their fatality figures)! (That was sarcasm, by the way.)

Not if you’re a communist regime. Remember, in communism, there is no individual. Everyone belongs to the state.

>If I were to make a great bio weapon that would do the maximum damage

You must not know much about bioweapons, then. By any measure, SARS-CoV-2 is a very, very poor bioweapon.

Think about it... it infects everyone but for the most part younger people don't die from it or even become incapacitated. It's mostly killing the elderly or people who have pre-existing conditions.

Effectively, SARS-CoV-2 helps the nation that's infected with it prepare for conventional conflict... it leaves younger people able to fight in the military and with some immunity to the weapon, it greatly reduces the need to care for the elderly or those in poor physical condition, freeing up workers for weapons production or logistics.

It's easy to stop this supposed "weapon" from spreading, just social distance and wear a mask... if everyone does it, the attack is ineffective.

Any country that attacked another using SARS-CoV-2 as a weapon would be suiciding. All the virus would accomplish is making the youngest, most able portion of the target population very angry and reducing the number of non combat capable people they have to take care of.

But wait, you say... the US is having a much higher impact from the virus.

That's because our leadership has failed outright and continues to do so at many levels. Calling the virus a hoax, politically motivated re-openings, the support of ignorance instead of science, conspiracy theories... all due to poor leadership.

Which of course is the real reason this tinfoil hat theory that the virus is a weapon hasn't died yet. Convincing a large number of people that it's a weapon would remove responsibility from Trump and the GOP for failing so incredibly badly, or at least make them look better in the run-up to the election.

The truth is that SARS-CoV-2 isn't a weapon, it's a pandemic which the US could have quickly suppressed and defeated, but did not because our corrupt, inept government worships ignorance instead of enlightenment.

Or what if the virus was intentionally released to remove a costly population demographic (old & infirm) that no longer have a cost benefit for the CCP/PRC GDP. Keep in mind that we still don't have valid numbers from China so we don't know how many died though back-channel reports say the reported numbers are much too low. The virus may very well have performed its intended purpose and any damage to enemies of the CCP is just iceing on the cake.

Good question! But I just write javascript :) very interesting stuff

Just looking at it from an effect perspective, it’s clear that the much more virulent variant was much easier to keep under control.

> Why would a gain analysis try to find ways in which a virus could be made weaker?

You're presuming it was for gain analysis. What if the intention was different? What if you were ultimately considering the virus for bio-warfare and wanted to hide that intention?

If we're going to explore theories this fits the evidence, or is at least possible.

I read that viruses, as a whole, are trending to be less severe because highly lethal viruses kill the host faster than it can spread. They could be researching ideas like this.

maybe to be safe and minimize the consequence of accidents?

maybe you can still arrive to the same conclusion, regardless of suppressing or amplifying a trait?

Why do you think it's very, very unlikely?

Accidental releases of viruses from labs have happened quite regularly. It's a serious concern.

The UK was first introduced to the uselessness of Imperial College and their epidemiological modelling by an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001 amongst livestock. It resulted in mass killing (by humans) of animals. Eventually the epidemic disappeared, amongst great acrimony and disaster for farmers.

In 2007 foot and mouth appeared again. This time, the virus was traced to the source of the outbreak. It came from a lab in Pirbright where the virus had been stored for research. Two government orgs were connected by pipes, and the pipes had been allowed to rust due to a budget dispute over which org should pay for repairs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_Kingdom_foot-and-m...

There's a long history of biolabs leaking and being found to be dangerous. It's not at all unlikely given this shoddy history.

https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/the-long-histo...

the New York Times (8/5/19) reported: “Deadly Germ Research Is Shut Down at Army Lab Over Safety Concerns”

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/17/reports...

"Hundreds of bioterror lab mishaps cloaked in secrecy"

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/06/23/undisclosed-cd...

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday they have identified 34 incident reports involving bioterror pathogens mishandled at CDC labs that were “inadvertently” not disclosed in 2014 to congressional investigators who had asked for the information

Oh and here's one from December 2019:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03863-z

Chinese institutes investigate pathogen outbreaks in lab workers

> why would an experiment make a less severe virus in the first place?

Wouldn't that make it seem safer to study?

Is this actually the case? This paper [1] seems to indicate that there are multiple types of gain-of-function research, not just an increase in virulence. In fact, the paper specifically discusses “transmissibility”, which would seem to support the argument of the paper under discussion: “In short, SARS-CoV-2 is possessed of dual action capability. In this paper we argue that the likelihood of this being the result of natural processes is very small”

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK285579/

Sure. The issue is that there would have to be gain-of-function research to reduce virulence and (maybe, it's not entirely clear) to increase transmissivity.

There is no evidence for that AFAIK, and I don't understand why a lab would do a gain of function experiment and reduce function instead.

It strikes me as reducing virulence would be a responsible first step before conducting research on increasing transmissivity of a deadly virus.

Do you have the study where they would have reduced virulence for these reasons? Because reducing the virulence of a virus to such a level that a large part of the population don't even get any symptoms seems odd to say the least.

Also, it's not even clear that COVID-19 is that much more infectious (or at all) than SARS, it seems to me that its explained well enough by so many people brushing it off or not even realizing they have it because it's so much less severe.

Reasons a [malicious|altruistic] actor might do that:

You have the ability to use it to induce fear and therefore behavioral changes. Positive cases are valuable.

Plausible deniability.

Mistakes.

Response.

Testing (as parent pointed out).

Assume it's academic research.

Introducing feature X (regardless of effect) allows you to study X.

You do it to learn more about X, not because you particularly want to engineer something more virulent or lethal.

Yes, exactly, which is discussed in the paper. The goal of gain of function research isn’t about “let’s make viruses that do crazy shit,” it’s a method of hypothesis testing. When you can successfully add (or remove) stuff then you can test hypotheses that would otherwise not be testable.

Reduce virulence compared to what? SARS-1? But they are not talking about SARS-1, they actually were talking about some other random bat viruses, which have zero virulence in humans.

Au contraire, you would expect random bat viruses to be incredibly virulent in humans.

Really? How is that? Proof? Link?

This research seems relevant;

>Our key result is that hosts most closely related to humans harbour zoonoses of lower impact in terms of morbidity and mortality, while the most distantly related hosts—in particular, order Chiroptera (bats)—harbour highly virulent zoonoses with a lower capacity for endemic establishment in human hosts.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.201...

True, but to be dangerous the have to pass cross species barrier, before that event, virulence is exactly zero. So, random bat viruses have zero virulence in people.

Edit: I'm very wrong about the terminology here.

---

CoV-2 is way more virulent than SARS, as evidenced by the fact it's spread across the entire world. SARS might spread more easily from contact, and it does more damage once it's inside you, but that's only one component of virulence. MERS is also not really comparable - it's very difficult to transmit between humans.

I get what you're saying but practical effects just matter more than isolated metrics. Viruses that transmit asymptomatically are more likely to be virulent, because you can't isolate patients. If you're trying to engineer a virus, you want to make it transmit faster than it kills people and you want to make it hard to quarantine.

You're confusing virulence and infectivity. Virulence is specifically how severe a virus is. For example, one might say that Hepatitis is more virulent than the common cold.

You're right, I am. I should have focussed on the point that asymptomatic transmission and lack of severity may be a feature in an engineered virus, not a bug.

What I know is that a virus like Ebola, which kills almost everybody who is untreated, cannot be that successful as a virus like Covid19 or HIV, because it gets no chance to spread. The corona virus is so successful because it can spread without killing everybody.

How can you argue that the outcome of a test is known before that test is performed? That’s why the test is made in the first place.

> SARS-CoV-2 is much less virulent than SARS or MERS.

Can you provide sources for that? I thought it was the opposite.

Virulence :

1. the severity or harmfulness of a disease or poison.

COVID-19 - has an fatality rate of around 0.5-1%, according to the best methodologies we have, in various environments, with recent papers suggesting that it might be even less lethal in places where medical care is sufficient.

In comparison, the best data for SARS fatality rates is of around 11% (!).

This means that SARS-CoV-2 is around ten times less virulent than SARS. MERS is even worse than SARS.

Now, SARS-CoV-2 is likely even more infectious than SARS, but part of that is because it's less severe, meaning that you can spread it even without being sick.

Thanks, I had my definitions wrong :)

Should we go by the crude fatality rate since the data around COVID-19 isn't rock solid yet right? Shouldn't we measure COVID-19's virulence by the IFR aka infection fatality rate instead? As of today with 14,194,795 cases and 599,438 deaths, COVID-19's infection fatality rate is 4.23%. By comparison, SARS only had 8,098 cases and only 774 deaths, giving it an IFR of 9.56%.

4.23% is a case fatality rate, or CFR, not IFR.

The issue is the SARS had a lot less cases, and was more virulent. There is no evidence for asymptomatic spread of SARS, and almost every single infection was accounted for using contact tracing.

Therefore, it makes sense to use the best guess at IFR for both. The best guess for IFR for COVID-19 is around 0.3-0.9%, depending on the state of the healthcare system.

SARS however, seems to have a very low rate of asymptomatic carriers : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3371799/ , of around 7%. Of those 7%, it is expected that the vast majority are detected, as there were very few cases of SARS of unknown origin (IE, no contact with an infected person). On the other hand, COVID19 is believed to have asymptomatic infection rates of as high as 50%, and even at the very beginning there were tons of cryptic transmission.

Therefore, it is likely that the CFR of SARS is very close the IFR. Using a high-estimate for the IFR of COVID19 and comparing it to the CFR of SARS should yield a very good comparison for virulence of the two viruses.

Therefore, SARS is indeed in the ballpark of 10x more virulent than COVID19.

We need to be really careful about the claims of asymptomatic infection.

The problem with this concept is it becomes impossible to detect false positives. In fact it makes the test the ground truth rather than actual observable clinical sickness. Any bug in the test thus creates a pseudo-epidemic:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00047325.htm

If you look at that paper you can see it admits that other research studies found no asymptomatic infection at all. Others on the other hand said they saw it. So there's no real consensus that this phenomenon actually exists in this case, and the asymptomatic people didn't seem to transmit the virus at all (so why are we all wearing masks now then?).

The numbers involved are tiny. Their conclusions are based on the antibody test returning positive without symptoms for just 6 people. The amount of antibodies found in the asymptomatic cases was significantly lower than for other cases, leading to the question of whether they were picking up noise at the edge of the test's capabilities and whether they truly understand how the test works (given that there weren't many SARS-CoV-1 cases, there'd be limited cases on which to test or calibrate it).

Isn't there often a trade-off between virulence and infectiousness in viral transmission?

See "A transmission-virulence evolutionary trade-off explains attenuation of HIV-1 in Uganda" https://elifesciences.org/articles/20492

That trade off is made by evolution. I don't see why scientists in a lab would make that trade off in a gain of function analysis - you can just make it more infectious and keep (likely increase) the level of virulence.

Since evolution isn't involved in the proposed mechanism, I see no reason why such a trade-off would occur.

I think you presume a level of mastery over artificially engineered viruses that just doesn't exist. Is it obvious before a modification is made to a virus strand whether it will be more or less virulent? Besides, engineering for virulence can easily get yourself killed. Furthermore it didn't necessarily have to be engineered for nefarious purposes. It could have been an experimental virus that accidentally escaped and that's all.

Perhaps depends on your goals. Virulent enough to cause global panic and show how a totalitarian state can respond better to a pandemic than democratic stated. But not virulent enough to actually kill everyone.

Similarly SARS and MERS were perhaps too virulent and could thus easily be controlled by screening for symptoms, while the new coronavirus can spread without symptoms, which could possibly be attributed to the lower virulence.

Now this sounds exactly like something Donald Trump has been saying all this time, and such conspiracy theories don't contribute much to the discussion.

If thousands of deaths in China, a complete lockdown that hit the economy incredibly hard and perhaps more crucially, the total breakdown and potential reshaping of the global supply chain, which China has been benefitting from massively, is something that the Chinese gov wants to to achieve, then such conspiracy theories might hold water. I think it's plain to see how nonsensical they are.

Also, nobody made the US look bad but themselves. This is obvious if you compare COVID responses in countries like Germany with those in the US.

Which professional published best case death estimate did the US not beat?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23407130

Excess deaths are the only accurate measure.

Then it was truly unavoidable for the us to keep getting worse and worse, for some reason more in states full of people who think masks are mind control (a total mystery that we will never understand), while other countries are seeing things get better.

It's not that mysterious how tribalism, fear, and the discomfort of admitting being wrong, just to name a few contributing factors, can result in people holding irrational beliefs.

They're not a different species, they're people. If you give into the urge to treat them as "other", as inferior, or as a different "tribe" to be defeated you're not as different from them with their ridiculous beliefs as you might like to think.

We? No. You don't understand. That's fine. You can learn.

https://stpauls.vxcommunity.com/Issue/Us-Experiment-On-Infan...

You ignored the Q you responded to. "Which professional published best case death estimate did the US not beat?"

The "a total mystery that we will never understand" was intended to be fairly obvious sarcasm. My mistake.

That's not completely true. Some of those pressures still apply to artificial viruses once they're released. Highly dangerous viruses get quarantined, and viruses that produce symptoms quickly (and don't transmit asymptomatically, or have a shorter window) are more obvious. Both of those properties reduce real-world transmissability, which is all that actually matters.

I'd argue that SARS-CoV-2 is very far from the Pareto optimal trade-off in infectivity and virulence. There are viruses that are both more virulent and more infectious.

Maybe, but I can't imagine it's easy to reach it, or really establish it. Too many variables to predict.

Like to be clear I don't think it was deliberately engineered to be optimal. If it's engineered at all I'd imagine it's an experiment that escaped.

Good summary, thanks!

Related to the origin hypotheses, the hypothesis of zoonotic outbreak from a wet market in mid-Dec no longer seems as relevant. It was first laid out in a widely disseminated paper in The Lancet [1, see Figure 1B], but since then retrospective wastewater analyses from Italy[2], Spain[3], Brazil and others[4] have found it was circulating much earlier.

"The Italian National Institute of Health looked at 40 sewage samples collected from wastewater treatment plants in northern Italy between October 2019 and February 2020. An analysis released on Thursday said samples taken in Milan and Turin on Dec. 18 showed the presence of the SARS-Cov-2 virus." [2]

and

"Most COVID-19 cases show mild influenza-like symptoms (14) and it has been suggested that some uncharacterized influenza cases may have masked COVID-19 cases in the 2019-2020 season (11). This possibility prompted us to analyze some archival WWTP samples from January 2018 to December 2019 (Figure 2). All samples came out to be negative for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 genomes with the exception of March 12, 2019, in which both IP2 and IP4 target assays were positive. This striking finding indicates circulation of the virus in Barcelona long before the report of any COVID-19 case worldwide." [3]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7159299/ [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-... [3] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v... [4] https://twitter.com/LMeigre/status/1282819131390210050

I think the “hypothesis of zoonotic outbreak from a wet market in mid-Dec” is still very relevant, and the few papers claiming to have evidence of SARS-CoV-2 prior to Dec 2019 outside China are still very questionable. It’s not like they tested old samples in a few places and the virus promptly showed up. Rather, lots of old samples were tested all over the place, and the virus almost never showed up, except in a very few instances that night more parsimoniously be explained with false positives.

It isn’t relevant, and hasn’t been since almost the beginning of the pandemic. We’ve known since March that the earliest retroactively identified case of the disease in China was from October and had no connection with the Wuhan wet market. The wet market may be the the earliest identified widespread outbreak, but it is clear that the crossover event happened earlier and the virus had been circulating at low levels prior to that.

> but it is clear that the crossover event happened earlier and the virus had been circulating at low levels prior to that.

Source? Definitely some experts think it is not impossible that it was brought to the wet market very early in the outbreak, that's not implausible at all. But the idea that it was circulating globally or widely at all before that is not backed by the evidence.

There are some Brazilian researchers in the process of mapping the whole genome of some samples collected and frozen back in November 2019 that they believe to be SARS-CoV-2.

It will be interesting to see how that compares to a Wuhan sample and see if it had most of the novel features of COVID-19, but is maybe missing one thing like how it binds to ACE2 which is probably implicated in all the cardiovascular issues it causes.

Why not both?

There could have been a baseline level of the virus or a close brother of it in circulation early in 2019, but the conditions of the wet market ecosystem in late 2019 let it suddenly spiral out of control, or make a final evolution to its current high-transmissiveness form.

Sort of like how we can find, retrospectively, intermittent cases of HIV back to the early part of the 20th century, but it suddenly exploded in the 1980s.

It's actually been hypothesised from the beginning that ancestors of Covid-19 passed back and forth between humans and animals several times before taking its current form. The idea being that an ancestor of the virus was first transferred to humans where it 'learned' how to adapt to the human body before transmitting back to an animal host and mutated to become more deadly to humans and then transferred back to humans. This is partly based on the idea that a successful virus wouldn't adapt to be more lethal to its host and that close cousins of Covid-19 have been found in several species of bats and other animals.

This actually makes China a much better candidate than Europe for the place where the most important step in its evolution occurred. China has much more vibrant trade in wild animals for clothing, consumption, and traditional medicine. China also happens to be the place where the first reports of widespread hospitalisations occurred.

I don't think it's possible that Covid-19 in its current form could have floated around with its current high level of transmissivity or even the lower level of transmissibility of the Chinese strain without being detected for more than a month.

As we've seen from America's second wave (bumpy first wave?) the virus replicates exponentially (even with some social distancing), so tens of thousands of people can be infected within two weeks. So we ought to see pretty strong signal in ICU admissions within about 5 weeks of an outbreak (allowing ramp up time, incubation period, and time for symptoms to progress). We'd also expect to see all-cause mortality rates of people over 65 to increase significantly within about 7 to 8 weeks of the outbreak occurring as the average time to mortality is about 18 days.

I fail to see how it'd be possible for the health system of any developed nation to miss all that, but a developing country that has a culture of secrecy and suppressing information from both its own people and central authorities? Yeah I could believe that.

> Sort of like how we can find, retrospectively, intermittent cases of HIV back to the early part of the 20th century, but it suddenly exploded in the 1980s.

That's in large part because HIV collided with African urbanisation, significant international air travel deflation, an explosion of homosexual activity (unprotected sex), an industrialised blood transfer system, and a drug epidemic with administration using shared syringes. I can't think of a similar set of factors changing in our current society that could have allowed for the explosion of a coronavirus.

I would consider the final evolutionary jump to not have been at the wet market, but the virology lab where someone who works with the bat virus caught the one in circulation worldwide - this more deadly virus broke out in Wuhan because that was where the last jump occurred.

Some viruses lie dormant in our bodies for years, was someone at the lab infected with a bat SARs virus at some point, and all it needed was this other virus to come along for it to share some of its virulence?

> Related to the origin hypotheses, the hypothesis of zoonotic outbreak from a wet market in mid-Dec no longer seems as relevant

Perhaps in your mind, but this is not at all a fair representation of the general scientific consensus - most still hold the weight of the evidence leans towards a November '19 origin in Wuhan

I think you were partly right on this, so wanted to update you in case you're interested. Science has a new interview with Zhi Zhengli who also no longer supports the idea that it was probably from the market:

"However, two papers published in late January revealed that up to 45% of the first confirmed patients—including four of the five earliest cases—did not have any ties to the market, casting doubt on the theory that it was the origin. Shi agrees: “The Huanan seafood market may just be a crowded location where a cluster of early novel coronavirus patients were found.”

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/trump-owes-us-apolog...

How did you determine the general scientific consensus?

Reading peer-reviewed papers & following field leaders on Twitter.

I have experience in academia, so it might be easier to parse because of that, but news articles are certainly not sufficient.

Please don't spew falsehoods and add 'general concesus' to it.

There are reports that the French team that traveled in October in Wuhan for mil. sports games, got infected by it. So, that it was at circulating in Wuhan at least since October, even most probably: early september.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/08/covid-19-pandemi...

Whether that's likely or not can be estimated by extrapolating case numbers from January back in time into 2019 and using a reasonable estimate for the R0 value without any measures against the spreading of the disease. Even if you don't trust the Chinese numbers, the estimate should be roughly in the right ballpark, since we certainly didn't have millions of deaths in Wuhan in January. The initial exponential growth phase is similar in all regions with comparable population density.

I haven't crunched these numbers, but a start in early September seems unlikely to me - call it a hunch, based on looking at the initial growth curves.

The Telegraph is not a reliable source for anything connected to covid.

The Telegraph is not a reliable source for anything.

Newspapers are not a reliable source for news.

The Telegraph only qualifies as a newspaper in the loosest of terms, in that it also sometimes reports news and is published in dead tree form.

Why did you quote me 'general concesus' and then misspell the word?

I'm not going to respond to the rest of the comment suggesting the Telegraph should be part of my consideration when judging the science.

He cited papers, you referenced a "general scientific consensus". This is a gun fight, sir, so you'd best put that knife away.

He cited two scientific papers, one which is peer-reviewed and indicates that the virus originated in Wuhan and one which is an un-peer reviewed pre-print on medRxiv, funded by a private company with interest in promoting the efficacy of wastewater monitoring, that Covid was present in wastewater. It's worth looking in to, but hardly discredits the widely-accepted Wuhan origin yet.

In your poorly fit analogy, the scientific consensus would be the gun to the single, unreviewed paper's knife.

I see you’ve played knifey spoony before!

I read the spain paper. They don’t report the false positive rate of the test they used, but if it was one that was commonly available, that paper’s P-value is something like 0.5. They don’t compute a P value.

Until the others make it through peer review, I wouldn’t read anything into their results.

As noted downthread, these points don't particularly point to it being engineered (point 1 applies in spades to SARS and MERS, for example). Most scientists believe the evidence [0] indicates it's of natural origin.

[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/the-new-coronavirus-could-have-...

> SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins were so effective at binding to human cells, they had to be caused by natural selection.

Read the article you are citing. There is convincing evidence that the virus developed via evolutionary mechanisms. That in no way refutes lab-origin and is entirely consistent with how most labs promote infectiousness (particularly airborn infectiousness) through gain-of-function research.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4693520/

>There is convincing evidence it developed via evolutionary origins.

Er, yes. Not sure what you're saying here (the title is "..Covid-19 is not a naturally-evolved virus...')?

Gain of function serial infection techniques do not constitute natural evolution: they constitute lab-directed evolution.

That is for all intents and purposes man-made, unless one is splitting hairs, which much of the politicized media is doing.

Very unlikely to be the case here though, in particular because the same receptor domain is found in the wild (e.g. pangolins).

Yes, quite a lot of media have become politicised (the reason for which being quite well understood). None the less, the science is what it is - provisional. It is not surprising that commercial entities take particular positions to benefit from said politicisation.

In most countries at least, the science will ultimately give us the answer.

Thanks for the summary. It feels a bit like the intelligent design argument for God. It has these features, we can’t imagine them randomly coming together, so it must have been designed. Add that humans really want to ascribe motive and reason to events, when sometimes it really is jus chance.

You’re missing step 2: a group of virologists published research showing (indirectly, over time) exactly how one might create a chimeric virus with the characteristics of SARS-CoV-2. The argument is not “we can’t imagine them randomly coming together”, the argument is “these virologists had the experience and knowledge to put them together, and have been doing so for years in their experiments”

No, but other similar viruses have already risen out the same general conditions in China before. The evidence to say that this one is different is going to need to be very compelling. Circumstances are not enough.

I feel step 4. is just a more specific detail of step 2, and the critical tricky piece of their argument is step 3 because that's the step that synthesizes steps 1 and 2. I imagine that the rebuttals would try to show that step 1 or 3 do not hold.

Right, in the conclusion they refer to "means, timing, agent and place" which seems to frame this like one would prosecute a criminal trial in the absence of "smoking gun" physical evidence. If the researchers at the heart of all this were located far from the epicenter of the outbreak, then you'd need to find a good explanation for why it started where it did, which is why I think it should be mentioned as a distinct point of evidence.

Ah okay it's like the difference between a forensic argument vs a scientific argument.

No, that’s a misleading comparison. There is no such thing as a “scientific argument” about matters of historical record, because you cannot conduct science on history. Forensics is all there is. It’s just that there is no piece of evidence that incontrovertibly ties the virus to the lab prior to the outbreak, e.g. a leaked research document dated prior to the outbreak showing knowledge of the virus or something.

I think it's more people taking what a court calls 'evidence' and declaring it 'scientific evidence' - sure they both use that same word 'evidence' but they are quite different things and shouldn't be mixed

The summary is very much faithful, unfortunately followed by comments from commenters who obviously did not read the paper. I would just add this item, paraphrasing the paper:

In 2015 the Wuhan team of virologists working with researchers from Chapel Hill, NC obtained a chimeric virus able to infect the human respiratory tract, while unexpectedly featuring an increased pathogenesis in the mouse. The dangerous outcome was briefly discussed in the original paper, and further experiments seemed to have been carried out only at the Wuhan lab, possibly because of a US gov ban on such experiments that existed at that time.

Thank you for this summary.

A slightly tangential question I'd love to get more perspective on is the impact of the virus being "man made" on our current predicament. Even assuming that the virus was not naturally evolved, and its characteristics are partly caused due to human interventions we're still stuck finding a vaccine, medication and ways of reducing transmission.

Is there still a thread here that this virus is evidence that humans can possibly create chimeric viruses? In my limited understanding, using protein sequences to modify viruses is generally believed to be possible.

In the article, the authors say that, in 2015, US researchers created a chimeric virus from a bat coronavirus to infect mice lung cells. They tested the virus on human lung cells and predicted that it would be very dangerous to humans. They stopped doing research on it because it would break the US rules against making human viruses more powerful. They were working with virus researchers from Wuhan. The authors conjecture that the Wuhan researchers used the same techniques and made Sars-cov-2 and it accidentally got out.

The issue is that SARS-CoV-2 is much, much less powerful. So that doesn't really follow.

Compared to what? Not much is known how powerful that chimeric virus was compared to CoV-2. Could please elaborate where did you get that notion from&

What do you mean by this? I heard that it has incredible affinity to ACE receptors, which is why it sprrads so quickly (combined with asymptomatic infection)

Yes, it binds to ACE2 receptors more strongly, but once you're infected it's about one order of magnitude less severe.

To note, receptor affinity is not the only mechanism by which infectivity is modulated. You would already expect that a virus that is ten times less severe would spread more easily, and SARS was already able to spread efficiently through air at great distances, so it seems likely that me that receptor affinity is stronger but that other mechanism are weaker. This would explain the fact that it is less severe and not much more infectious.

Modifying a sample genome is easy. It has been done routinely in industry and academia for decades.

Alternatively, they can inexpensively “print” entire virus genomes from scratch from a digital copy, but the “printer” is pricey.

(I’m being intentionally vague here, and skipped a few steps. I accidentally wrote a tutorial for starting your own biological weapons lab, then edited it down.)

>the impact of the virus being "man made" on our current predicament

One good aspect could be the lack of an animal reservoir would make it less likely to come back. So far minks seem to be the only animals to catch it in a major way.

Or, and this is a really crazy theory, they were studying it in China because it was a local virus that they were worried might one day infect humans. Maybe they were studying which changes would make it most dangerous because they wanted to be ready if those changes happened naturally. Honest hard work can sometimes look like evil plans, and not every coincidence is the result of conspiracy.

I actually believe this to be the case. From what I have read researchers often do something called gain of function research. In this research they add genetic features to viruses that could make it more infective. This is done, at least in part, to help learn how to protect society from such a virus if it were to evolve naturally. I thought I heard somewhere that one of the functions coronavirus has that its closest known relatives do not have just happens to be something that virologists frequently add.

All this leads me to believe it was created in a lab. Likely for altruistic purposes but still. When this escaped whoever knew that it was from a lab should have disclosed it ASAP to help the world prepare.

I have no experience in virology so don't trust me.

The thing I just don't understand is why gain research would take the effort of making the virus much less deadly. This virus is around ten times less deadly that SARS, wouldn't gain research at least maintain virulence?

You switch from death rate or R0, so it's not clear which variable you are referring to. COVID-19 may be less deadly, but it has killed more people than SARS. So it does appear to be a 'better' virus.

One way of discovering what increases property X is testing that some change decreases property X.

Another way of discovering what increases property X is testing that some change indeed increases property X, while also discovering it decreases property Y.

While attempting to increase both X and Y, they made an intermediate with increased X and decreased Y. Perhaps it seemed a promising starting point to also increase Y.

I don't get the surprise. This is all par for the course in research.

Depends, what if you had a virus that caused the same antiviral response as SARS on the immune system but had no deaths (couldn't cause death)?

I do not have experience in virology either but what you heard is correct. Researchers do work on creating new strains of viruses, with the goal being development of vaccines before epidemics start.

> they were studying it in China because it was a local virus that they were worried might one day infect humans. Maybe they were studying which changes would make it most dangerous because they wanted to be ready if those changes happened naturally.

The person you're responding to didn't say anything different to what you've said.

> Honest hard work can sometimes look like evil plans, and not every coincidence is the result of conspiracy.

Why did you say that? It certainly isn't stated or even implied by the person you're replying to.

The person he/she/they is responding to may not have originated the thought, but the quote this poster is responding to is very clear from context. It reads as follows:

“The authors feel that, in light of this preponderance of circumstantial evidence, the hypothesis that the biogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 involved human intervention should be seen as the leading (i.e. most likely) explanation.”

Which is not an accusation of research done in bad faith. The linked paper referenced 4 others as evidence. It doesn't say that those 4 were somehow done for evil - just that they were done.

Even taking the worst possible view of the Chinese government, they have strong economic reasons to have been preparing for a new SARS type epidemic over the past twenty years. They don't need the benefit of the doubt.

One could also easily argue that the CCP has very little to gain from ruining almost all of their customers financially.

So far, it also looks like mainland China was hit hard, while Taiwan got off easy. The CCP would most likely not strengthen a territory that they hope to eventually absorb.

And lastly, I would assume that with Trump, the CCP could just bribe their way into Washington.

So I see very little for them to be gained from starting this. And you yourself also conclude that India is benefiting more than China.

Why give a government with modern day concentration camps, an avoidable epidemic of prisoners with COVID-19, and military occupation of free countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, or more historically in Iraq (again), Somalia, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Cuba, I feel like I’m just naming random countries at this point...the benefit of the doubt about anything?

Comments like this really derail an otherwise civil and interesting discussion.

Syria is a free country? Have you been there?

Because China didn't kill George Floyd in daylight?

C'mon Hong Kong belongs to China and always was. It was just leased to UK and this lease had ended in last century. China just wanted to reap benefits of Being Kong economy this is why they given them such a huge autonomy . They can change it anytime as this is their property. If someone would follow your logic Hawai is also US occupied country ...

So I'm not going to get into an argument, just make three basic points to reply here:

Hong Kong did not always belong to China, and was not leased to the UK - part of Hong Kong's area (the New Territories) was leased, but Kowloon and Hong Kong island were ceded in perpetuity.

China signed an international treaty with the UK regarding the handover of Hong Kong, a treaty which comes with certain rights and responsibilities. Sure, there's no real way to actually enforce such a treaty, but you can't really complain if other countries react to the breaking of a treaty with punitive measures, and don't trust the treaty-breaker not to break other treaties in future.

How about asking the people of Hong Kong what they want? There's about 7.5 million of us here, with a fairly unique history and culture, so maybe just being subsumed into another country wouldn't be the choice of the population?

Hawaii was taken from its native peoples and there is a very slow process underway to remediate that. [0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_recognit...

This is not the scientific method you are applying but a hopeful emotional reaction.

Yeah sure the racist hypothesis of Chinese people eating bats is far more likely than a virus escape from a Wuhan lab with known protocol defects that worked on coronaviruses. /s

Are you saying bats weren't sold/used as food in Wuhan?

What's racist about suggesting someone eats bats? Mammalian flesh is a common food source across human cultures.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_as_food

Bats are not really eaten as food in China. Maybe eaten as part of traditional medicines or rarely in specific rural areas but that's about it.

The videos of people eating bats that surfaced following the beginning of Covid-19 were from Indonesia.

The way this misinformation has spread is indeed based on racism (Chinese are 'barbarians' who have 'barbarian' eating habits and they should change them and eat like 'normal' people).

Now, (fruit) bats eaten as food in West Africa is a major vector of the spread of Ebola.

> Now, (fruit) bats eaten as food in West Africa is a major vector of the spread of Ebola.

And maybe one day we can conclusively say bats play no roles whatsoever in the spread of Covid-19, like we are able to say confidently about bats and Ebola. We aren't at that point yet, dismissing bats as a factor is a disservice to science.

Discussing whether bats play a role as vector or reservoir of the virus is not the same as making thinly-veiled racist comments on a culture or as spreading misinformation on a culture.

Would you rather that we don't discuss bats in this specific thread? Because all that mentioned so far is that bats are(were) sold at Wuhan market as food, and that they may have a role in spreading the virus. Both of that is true. Nothing that implies Chinese people are "barbarians" or they should eat like "normal people".

Bringing racism up where it doesn't exist discourages, or at worst suppresses, a healthy discussion.

A healthy discussion starts by acknowledging bias, racism, and misinformation. All of which have been widespread on this issue (Covid-19).

Now, this thread goes further by continuing to relay the conspiracy theory that the virus is man-made, not least when the paper concludes by claiming that the burden of proof is reversed and that it is the natural origin of the virus that must be proven.

It’s not racist to say Chinese eat bats. That’s simply a fact. If it helped this virus, that’s another debate.

> China

5. Cui Bono?

That’s a heck of a lot of steps to get to that conclusion.

There is a massive amount of misinformation around COVID-19. Check out this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misinformation_related_to_the_...

All the things that the article posits have been looked into and the conclusion from most of the scientific community is that it is extraordinarily unlikely that this came from a lab in Wuhan.

> the conclusion from most of the scientific community

Who is this "scientific community" that you speak of, anyway? Modern science is conducted through published research papers. I read papers and decide for myself which arguments to believe. Do I understand everything? No, of course not, but I learn a helluva lot more than if I trust what a secondary source tells me about scientific research and leave it at that. You only have to read a few papers to realize that what is reported in the media is often radically different than what the authors actually claim in a paper.

But really, this is tackled head-on in the paper itself. There is basically one peer-reviewed paper that argues against the man-made theory, and the authors point out flaws in that paper. I also read it an did not come away thinking that they had made a particularly convincing argument. I encourage you to do the same; it's a very approachable paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095063/

They even state that "More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another." In other words, the jury is out, and the prosecution has brought more evidence. Time to reevaluate.

It is a false claim that the Covid-19 outbreak started from Wuhan. Scientists from Spain, Italy and Brazil have independently reported the detection of the coronavirus in their city waste water samples dating back to early 2019.

China was the first country to detect the existence of the coronavirus, but it does not mean the virus started in China. If a country announces the finding of a new virus, it makes that country a whistle-blower for the mankind, not the scapegoat.

This has been considered to be a problem with cross-contamination, only one sample was found in Spain for example.

The fact that the virus was detected in wastewater samples in Italy earlier doesn't by itself rule out an origin from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or from China.

It does not rule out the origin from Italy, USA, Spain, UK or any other countries on the earth either.

True, but what you wrote suggested that the fact it was detected elsewhere exonerates China. It does not.

Could you link some sources for that claim?

Brazil https://www.scmp.com/news/world/americas/article/3091757/ear...

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

Italy https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53106444

November 17 in China?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/13/first-covid-19...

Possibly in October..

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/coronavirus-...

as early as September?

https://www.newsweek.com/coronavirus-outbreak-september-not-...

I'm getting tired of Googling fake news

Thanks for doing it though.