1. The theory has always been that it jumped from bats to another animal -- like the kind sold at the market.
2. "It does not appear that the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention — the one close to the market — had published any research on the topic prior to the pandemic."
Its possible one person could have contracted the virus, then traveled to the wet-market, which is about 20 miles away, then spent some time there shopping there and passed it on to others.
Then again, it could have come from the wet market and it could be a coincidence.
I don't want to make this into a left-wing vs right-wing thing.
> There is no way in hell you're going to convince me that a plague coming out of a geographical area containing a BSL-4 and BSL-2 lab had absolutely no bearing on the matter.
Do you have the causality backwards. The laboratory is in that region because there are local disease caring populations of animals. That’s what they study.
I do not. See section 8.7 in the link. Most of the bats are endemic to a cave over 1000 miles away. The bats weren't common in Wuhan. If they were, it was most likely as a part of some active research project rather than because bat sounded like a great idea to add to the menu. I'm not a local, so I'll admit to not having primary experience of the area. But the pile of circumstantial evidence is non-bloody trivial and bares being given the courtesy of a looking into in parallel with the Market theory.
I've banned this account until we get some indication that you want to use HN as intended. That would include not using a trollish username. You're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com if you don't want to be banned.
Rich Condit: This raises the issue, again, just briefly, that I was going to comment on earlier. It came up two letters ago, the phrase "correlates of protection", which is a really slippery concept, because it's really easy to make the assumption that "oh, you make antibodies and that's it". No. Or, "you make antibodies to this particular protein, that's all you got to do." No. Immunity that confers protection can be much more complicated than that.
Alan Dove: Everybody with HIV produces antibodies against HIV and they're great antibodies against the virus, and guess what: you still have HIV. So the antibodies in that case are not a correlate of protection. They're just something your body has done. On the other hand, if you're producing great antibodies against measles virus, you're probably protected. That's a very good correlate of protection.
Condit: So figuring out what actually protects you with any particular pathogen is a critical issue and not straightforward.
Brianne Barker: There have been a few times where we've mentioned "neutralizing antibodies" today. Neutralizing is one of the things antibodies can do. That means they can block viruses from getting in to cells or interacting with cells. And so sometimes the correlate is you have to make neutralizing antibodies, not just any old antibodies.
I wonder, if at this point, Twitter should consider updating their policy to state that government officials are no longer allowed to use their platform and close their accounts.
Twitter has no interest in doing that. I would recommend people start asking their lawmakers for better rules around putting government messaging on public infrastructure rather than use of accounts on third-party commercial services.
We live in an age where open web standards can create software that looks and feels a lot like the existing closed/commercial platforms (ActivityPub/Mastodon et cetera).
