Well, that and the fact that there were a shitload of people filling up hospitals. If my recollection and current knowledge of the pandemic’s chronology is accurate, this dramatic increase in hospitalizations due to COVID-19 was happening in Wuhan and really nowhere else that we know of. It seems to me it was detected because it was a local/regional epidemic that was rapidly spiraling out of control - in Wuhan before anywhere else.
Indeed. I think Riemann has laid out a perfectly plausible case for the lab hypothesis, and as I said up-thread, the Chinese government’s behavior (dealings with WHO, for example) since the start of the pandemic isn’t doing anything to poke holes in that hypothesis.
We have several lab escape hypotheses floating around in this thread. It seems like we all agree the virus wasn’t engineered, so we’re now talking about hypotheses that now involve a natural process that was mediated by a lab mishap. What does that look like?
- The virus evolved in the wild
- A lab technician happened to cross paths with an animal infected with a totally novel viral strain that nobody was looking for.
- The lab technician accidentally got infected at collection. (If not, then continue)
- The sample was brought to the lab
- The sample happened to be carelessly stored
- The safety lapse also resulted in a lab staff infection
- The lab staff infected others in the community.
The more steps you add, the more remote the probability becomes. The more steps you remove the chain to reduce the unlikeliness, the more it begins to look like “a lab technician chanced upon an infected animal”, which really isn’t that different from “a wet-market butcher chanced upon an infected animal” or “an insulation-installer encountered a diseased bat in the attic.”
I must have missed this part; which previous error are you talking about, and how much relevance does it have here?
Sure, but you’re kind of overcounting here. Step 4 is “the sample was brought to the lab”, but presumably all the samples that lab techs take get brought to the lab. So the probability of that step in the chain is probably “1”, and we could ignore it. And Step 7 is the same probability for any other case of species jumping, the first person to get it has to transmit it to other people. That doesn’t make the lab hypothesis any less likely. Now we’re down to 5 steps, and the first one is also common to both the lab and non-lab cases. So that’s 4 steps. And, really, steps 3,5,and 6 are all variations of “a lab worker got accidentally infected”. Listing them with increasing numbers makes it seem, rhetorically, like this is increasingly unlikely, but you know, human error happens.
The most unlikely thing in the list is step 2, but we’re then back to Reimann’s point that either scenario required a fairly unlikely event to happen, and you can’t just focus on how unlikely one scenario is and ignore the unlikeliness of the other scenario.
I think the only one with any likelihood is that there were actual people in China who had Covid-19. They had pneumonia and it wasn’t bacterial or the flu. So samples were taken and sent to the Wuhan lab. There was a lab accident that let out SARS-CoV-2 into the wet market in Wuhan creating a superspreader event. It also would mean that Covid-19 WAS ALREADY OUT THERE and the superspreader even would happen in some other city. There’s no evidence for this at all. However, we don’t have to bend over backwards creating GOF scenarios, etc. We’d still have to believe that everyone in that lab is lying.
If you believe I’m overcounting, then remove all the steps you believe are excessive. You’re left with a scenario that is no more likely than “a person came into contact with a bat or infected animal.”
I’ll return to the point that a wild-transmission scenario actually isn’t unlikely because we have many documented cases of it. It’s an abundantly likely scenario in this part of the world. For reasons I won’t speculate on, people are deciding that isn’t good enough and perhaps the less-likely scenario is actually what happened.
And that’s really my only point here. Although a lab release scenario is possible, and it’s not insane to look into it, I feel like we’re giving it a disproportional amount of faith. Perhaps due to the furtive fallacy, the belief that significant facts of history are necessarily sinister. Or proportionality bias, the belief that unusually significant events must have unusually significant causes.
RIght, the unlikely thing isn’t wild transmission, it’s the fact that it showed up in Wuhan first. That’s unlikely, given that there’s a coronavirus lab there, and it could have shown up in many different places.
We also have many documented cases of diseases escaping from labs.
I have only ever been arguing for “plausible”. I find it hard to estimate given the degree of unknowns, but right now, I’d say that I think that wild transmission is more likely than escape from the lab, but I don’t think that the escape from the lab hypothesis is crazy. If we found some new solid evidence that it did come from the lab I wouldn’t be surprised. So I think we’re in agreement at this point. I agree that it’s an open question how plausible the lab escape hypothesis is, and we’ll probably never know for sure. But I’m planting my flag on “not crazy”.
The presence of a lab does not decrease the ongoing probability of natural transmission one single bit. The two events are entirely unrelated except that you’d expect such a lab to be located closer to the phenomenon that it studies (which it is).
There’s no reason to be surprised the disease appeared in Wuhan, there’s no reason to be surprised that there’s a lab there, and there’s no reason to be surprised that the existence of the lab didn’t prevent natural transmission from occurring. Sure, look at the lab for thoroughness, but don’t hold that scenario to be especially likely.
The presence of the lab increases the probability that the disease came from the lab. Because if the disease came from a lab, then you’d most likely expect it to show up in Wuhan. We know that that probability is nonzero, but we can only estimate what it is by post hoc observations. The observation of disease in Wuhan increases the chance that the universe we live in is one where there was a lab escape.
Since the probability of all possible sources for the disease is 1 (the disease exists; it came from somewhere) the increase in one source of probability (lab escape) must imply a decrease in probability of the other explanations (natural transmission). Not because the lab decreases natural transmission, but because it adds other modes of transmission, which decreases the relative probabilities of non-lab transmission modes.
This is bedrock Bayes theorem stuff. The presence of the lab doesn’t necessarily make it the most likely source, but it can’t just be ignored or treated as an independent event.
Further explanation about Bayes’ Theorem. Bayes theorem is about adjusting your estimates of probability in response to new information.
Pre-pandemic, you might have the following probabilities of pandemic source (pick your own numbers if you want, these are for example purposes. I tried to be reasonable)
- Natural transmission, P(N) = 95%
- Lab escape, P(L) = 0.2%
- Other, P(O) = 4.8%
Now, after the pandemic, we have information that it was first discovered in Wuhan, so we consider the chance that that would happen in the various cases.
P(W | L) (probability of Wuhan if the source is lab escape) is… pretty high. 80% maybe? If it escaped from a lab, it still might end up having super spread events in some other region, but it’s most likely to show up in the surrounding region.
P(W | N) (probability of Wuhan if the source is natural) is probably reasonably approximated by population of the Wuhan region divided by the population of the general natural coronavirus endemic region. So, maybe… 11 million / 2 billion = 0.5%. And finally,
P(W) (probably of Wuhan given all sources) is likely dominated by the natural case (because of course that’s the most likely mode of transmission), plus a tiny bit from the lab/other, so maybe 0.6%.
Then we get to calculate our new probabilities:
P(L | W) (prob of lab escape given Wuhan discovery) = P(W|L)*P(L)/P(W) = 80%*0.2%/0.6% = 26%
P(N | W) (prob of natural given Wuhan discovery) = P(W|N)*P(N)/P(W) = 0.5%*95%/0.6% = 79%
Now, my priors might be wrong! Maybe 0.2% is way too high for the generic lab escape probability. Maybe my estimate of P(W|N) is wrong because Wuhan is more of a nexus for possible species transfer than the raw population numbers would suggest. Maybe a lot of things.
But the point is that even pretty unlikely things in a vacuum become relevant after you observe something that’s very likely to be observed after the unlikely thing happens. And there is a concrete mathematical way to determine exactly how relevant they are.
Thanks for that walrus,you saved me a lot of typing.
Sure but I’ll go one further, point 2 as stated is
Which seems a strange way to state it. For this lab, technicians would be crossing paths with those potentially infected animals on purpose. They would be going out, seeking viruses with the potential for causing problems and bringing them back to the lab. (and I added a statement above from one of the key leaders of the lab where it was admitted that this is exactly what they did, for multiple viruses). It would not be a freak or chance occurence, just the opposite in fact.
here’s an article that explains it.
Paywalled
The concern is (for me at least) a worrying lack of throughness from such as the WHO. The whole thing is of course deeply political and that’s getting in the way of actually finding out what really happened and that is the only thing that matters to me. I have no emotional or partisan investment in any particular explanation and I’d not be suprised by either lab-leak, natural, or combination of the two.
The old saying is that if you hear hoofbeats behind you on a city street you should think “horse” rather than “zebra”. But what if that city street is right next door to a zoo that is famous for it’s zebra and is particularly lax about fencing and security?
strange, It opens for me and I defintely don’t subscribe. Here’s a couple of relevant exceprts
Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats.
What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.
here’s a Washington Post youtube video about it
It’s not on a city street, it’s on an endless windswept plain full of horses after horses as far as the eye can see.
That’s the part that I feel like folks aren’t appreciating enough, the attraction of the sensationalized scenario is distracting people from appreciating exactly how common such events are in this area, which is (presumably) the reason the lab was located there in the first place.
What estimates would you give for
P(N), P(L), P(W), P(W|L), and P(W|N)?
And what are your arguments for why they are different from my estimates?
I believe your values for P(N) is at least an order of magnitude too low. I’m not sure about P(L) but consider (AFAIK) that there has been no previous pandemic occurrence happening because of a lab release. Even if I’m wrong about that, the number would still be incredibly low. Likewise it looks like you’re overestimating P(W) by taking your putative P(W|N) and arbitrarily increasing it by 20%, which doesn’t seem justifiable to me.
And exactly how common is it for a deadly virus to jump to humans and immediately be almost perfectly adapted for indoors airborne transmission between humans and leave no trace of how it got there?
How common do you think it is for a lab that specialises in researching bat-borne viruses that present a risk of cross-over to humans to be doing research into bat viruses that have a risk of cross-over to humans?
Fair. I don’t know what the right rates are. I’m not sure we can. I definitely accept the criticism that 0.5% to 0.6% has a large effect on the outcome.