And that, more than anything else, is why we should be suspicious of "exotic" theories like human intervention. It's an extraordinary claim, and it requires extraordinary proof. You seem to be arguing the opposite, when Occam is clear that we should be betting on natural evolution.
Transportation by lab personnel is the only way that RaTG13 is known to have come to Wuhan. Any animal transport is possible but only speculative. This entirely flips what should be the assumed scenario vis a vis Occam's razor.
The Bayesian probability suggests the odds that it would evolve by chance AND first become an issue right next to one of the top three bat virus research centers in the world are pretty slim.
It would be like a new mosquito disease first being an issue in human population next the CDC headquarters in Atlanta instead of somewhere in Africa of South America. Sure - there are mosquitos everywhere - but the chance that a new disease would start in Atlanta are very slim.
Also waste water samples from Spain and Italy show COVID-19 much earlier than reported in Wuhan.
Spain, March 2019, 1 sample https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-...
Italy, 18. December 2019 https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL8N2DW1YK
That being said, I don't know how the origin would help us right now. We have working vaccines. So the solution is to push vaccinations as fast as possible. The origin of the virus isn't that important right now.
It could be that a precursor was already spreading prior to the major outbreak but only detected when it hit Wuhan because so many coronavirus experts were concentrated in that area.
But your point is still a good one
The specific bats that host the ancestor of COVID-19 are quite a bit far away from those labs. The disease was first noticed near the labs.
Looking at the mechanics of the thing¹, I'd put a lab leak on similar odds of some village near the bats being infected and spreading it from there.
1 - I know nothing of their policy and competence to judge those.
This is wildly misstating the science. That bat virus is a relative, not an "ancestor". And it's not known to be limited to those "specific, far away" bats, that's merely where it was documented. Believe it or not we don't routinely test every animal species for an exhaustive catalogue of virus variants. It's just shotgun science.
And as it happens there was a close relative to covid found on the same continent in a species group that exists in a broad continuum basically everywhere. A bat-to-bat transmission to Wuhan is a bleedingly obvious hypothesis.
And yet we have to talk about all this Andromeda Strain nonsense anyway, based largely on jingoist US politics.
"Has this been causing small, stochastically limited outbreaks for some time before we picked it up?" is a question that has dogged several recent outbreaks.
lol care to share those numbers
Researchers have gone to a particular region of China and otherwise gone to great effort to find these particular bat viruses. I agree it is possible that they could be ignorant of the fact that the virus is in their own backyard. But it must a lower probability event that people got infected by such city bats given that we already know for certain the labs were transporting the bat viruses directly. Additionally, I would be surprised if they have not been testing nearby bats for such viruses since the outbreak happened. If they got a match it would be highly publicized.
There have been examples of bats excrement contaminating fruits on fields as a transmission chain. Accounting for these, often undiscovered, interactions is extremely difficult in terms of probability.
> we already know for certain the labs were transporting the bat viruses directly
In research from 5+ years ago, research which warned exactly about the fact how the virus already had overcome critical barriers to infect human cells [0]. A very plausible interpretation here can also be that said research was a warning about things to come, and is now mistaken as the original cause for it.
[0] https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology#Co...
The other source is a nature news article [1] which has by now following disclaimer:
> Editors’ note, March 2020: We are aware that this story is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.
It also states at the end:
> Without the experiments, says Baric, the SHC014 virus would still be seen as not a threat. Previously, scientists had believed, on the basis of molecular modelling and other studies, that it should not be able to infect human cells. The latest work shows that the virus has already overcome critical barriers, such as being able to latch onto human receptors and efficiently infect human airway cells, he says. “I don't think you can ignore that.” He plans to do further studies with the virus in non-human primates, which may yield data more relevant to humans.
So it might just as well be that these experiments warned us about that potential, and now that it actually happened, some people interpret the original warning as the cause.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/
[1] https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debat...
Unfortunately, SARS-CoV-2 is a very contagious virus, so it's hard to contain. A lot of ink has been spilled about the Wuhan BSL-4 lab, but these viruses were only considered to be a BSL-3 pathogen, and were handled in Baric's lab at UNC in their BSL-3. I would assume that they would also have been handled at the WIV's BSL-3. There had been reports of biocontainment lapses at the WIV, and there have been a number of lab escapes of various pathogens including SARS at other Chinese labs.
The reality is that epidemiology is not a straight forward nor simple field of research, finding concrete and solid answers is usually way more difficult than most people assume when they want answers to point fingers.
Post-hoc analysis of waste water and patient samples in Europe shows that it was circulating in Europe by mid-late 2019, way before the patient 0 in Wuhan.
So the leak hypothesis, while feasible, would have to address why the virus was seemingly abroad before it became a problem in Wuhan itself.
Of course it's a reasonable hypothesis, but putting it as number 1 is kind of reframing the whole picture.
I'm not sure that's terribly extraordinary and exotic.
I beg to differ. How many pandemic causing viruses have their ground zero right outside an instition that for the last decade has been cranking out study after study derived from GoF research? A place that also was receiving information from American university researchers on how to develop chimeric mutations? Which just happened to share genetic material with strains known to have been researched for bioweapon applications? All at the same time as an uptick in censorship of academic papers.
There's coincidence, and then there's coincidence. I don't think anyone was out to make the darn thing, or intentionally release it. When I see a bunch of virology going on, and a pandemic starts up next door, I'm not looking 1000 miles away for the source.
