Do you not find it absurd in the extreme that the novel Coronavirus lab a few km from the outbreak of a novel coronavirus was barred from investigation?
Is it not a giant raging blinking neon clue that when Australia wanted an investigation China threatened them with economic apocalypse?
And in this context, you think a .8% chance that it would appear near a lab is high enough to discount the possibility??? My head is exploding.
I wasn’t trying to prove a point, I was trying to dis-prove a point: that you can’t prove the lab leaks based on geography alone. 0.02% chance is VERY unlikely - it’s not proof but it sure does suggest. A 0.2% chance or a 0.8% chance is… well it’s still rare, but not shockingly rare. Again I suspect the geographic odds are even higher, if you properly correlate outbreak-size population density and labs. Bsl3 labs brings the odds closer to 5% (or 19% if you count the four other novel disease incidents and I’m doing my probability math right).
Again, none of this disproves a lab leak. But it sure does tell us that we can’t prove it with geography, as the post I was responding to suggested.
> "About 90% of the earth’s people live on only 10% of the land."
And let's assume that all of those 59 labs are in that 10% as well.
I'm sure it's actually smaller than that - since not all of that 10% of the land has enough density to be the epicenter of an outbreak, but... let's roll with that 10%
That'd put you off by a factor of 10.
14^2 * pi * 59 = 36,329 km2 148,326,000 * 10% = 14,832,600
36,329 / 14,832,600 = 0.00245 aka 0.2%
On top of that there have been multiple tries at this - in recent memory we've seen SARS classic, Covid-19, MERS-CoV, and Swine Flu. That's four chances at a target at least as big as 0.2%.
My probabilities are rusty, but I believe that's 99.8% * 99.8% * 99.8% * 99.8% = 99.2% chance of none of those appearing near a lab or an 0.8% chance it was near a lab. If we take that into account, it starts to seem a bit more likely that we'd see something like this...
And let's not even touch the > 1300 BLS3 labs that are out there.