Perhaps monitoring twitter and other social media for symptoms that deviate from the expected for the timeframe is the kind of surveillance mentioned in the article [1]. It is definitely unrealistic to be on the hunt for pathogens by inspecting every single person, but using social media for guided search could prove useful.
He was the first that publicly recognised the original outbreak as something new, but that's not the sort of preventive surveillance we're interested in.
Of course it would have been great if the Chinese were more transparent during those early days (and in general honestly), but it's pretty clear that the original outbreak was just the first smoke escaping from inside the burning roof: by late December it was already an uncontained epidemic that had spread far outside Wuhan.
We'd like something that would pick up the disease before it makes it to the epidemic status.
The probability of death for a healthy 30-something year old is lower than their probability to die in a car crash (1/10 to 1/100 of all cause mortality for that age group).
It’s a game of probability, of course, but it turns out that whistle blowers often suffer from “coincidences” and “low probability events”, and whenever that happens, I try to take note.
I think doctors at outbreaks like this are at much higher risk of death than the average person due to stress and a much higher viral load than normal. Medical professionals only start to use protective gear after they realized how dangerous a disease is. Before that their spending significant time around highly infectious people in inclosed spaces while under extreme stress.
Wuhan lost a significant number of medical professionals presumably due to this.
I assume that's the average death rate for healthy 30 year olds over the whole pandemic, I don't think it applies to how things were in the beginning with overrun hospitals and overworked health professionals.
If you look at the SARS epidemic you see plenty of cases like these.
It is unlikely, but unlikely events happen. It does not have to be a conspiracy.
Think about this: If he hadn't died, he probably would have received much less attention.
There were a few other eloquent Chinese whistle-blowers from the early days, Jan-Feb 2020, who have been silenced by government threats or by being detained, who do not have the public recognition of Dr Li - probably because they didn't die.
With regards to the car crash probability: those are the odds that if something were to kill you that it would be a car crash, not the odds of actually dying in a car crash. In reality the odds of any specific 30 year old male in the US dying in a car crash over the course of a year is 0.02% (I don't have data for driving fatalities for china, but I presume they are not substantially higher). This is about 50 times less likely than a 30 year old who has tested positive for covid dying from covid, or equivalently getting covid at 30 raises your risk of death as much as a second lifetime worth of driving.
The 0.02% number covers 20-49; It is lopsided, so it's likely that 30 is much less and 49 is much more ... ; So, it's not 1/100 or 1/1000 as I claimed, likely 1/10.
It doesn't appear to be evidence in either direction, honestly. They stick with the bat > human jump theory in the article, but it's more of an offhand remark than anything else.
yes, it is... There's no evidence of cases months earlier. Virus don't typically jump species and are effective immediately. They need time to adapt. Therefore:
a) The virus learned about humans over weeks or months in public with no one noticing
b) The virus learned about humans in a lab then leaked resulting in a fast moving pandemic
There are thousands of wet markets throughout China. Even if you restrict your view to major cities only, there's over 100 cities in China with a million inhabitants.
There were 2 known locations in China where coronaviruses were being studied - Beijing and Wuhan.
Now apply Bayesian analysis.
This is before you look at the coverup and the history of diseases escaping from research labs all over the world and the documented inadequate safety measures in the Chinese labs.
The longer time-line makes a lab leak incredibly unlikely. WIV publishes data and shares it with international collaborators frequently, given the fact that every paper on bat coronaviruses from the WIV has international collaborators, how does it make sense that the sample wasn't known to anyone else in the months between the leak and detection?
The "virus lab leak" hypothesis is primarily based on proximity. If the first human infection occurred a long time before the first recorded case, the virus could have travelled a long distance in the meantime, which makes proximity less of a factor. I.e. this is evidence against a leak, not in favor.
Extending the timeline from the first case to the first detected outbreak doesn't strengthen the theory though? If anything a longer timeline means more time for the virus to travel to Wuhan from somewhere else...
Anyway, the early cases that most closely match the supposed bat-virus ancestor aren't even from the same province as the Wuhan virus lab.
> the early cases that most closely match the supposed bat-virus ancestor aren't even from the same province as the Wuhan virus lab.
Which province were they from? I know that related samples were found in bat guano from Yunnan province, but I've never heard of earlier human cases in another province.
They probably won't be found. Needle in a haystack problem, compounded by the fact most Covid cases are minor and the major ones just look like atypical pneumonia if you don't know what to look for.
Not earlier but rather just some of the early cases.
The precise timeline of the outbreak is in any case very sketchy due to the natural circumstance that nobody was testing for it before the Wuhan outbreak, but of course the first time you find something doesn't have to be the first time you could have found it.
In https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2004999117 they report that (at the time) the known samples closest to the bat progenitor were collected 3-4 weeks after the outbreak was declared, and could be connected to a cluster (cluster A) of cases connected to Guangdong detected starting from two weeks after the outbreak.
It's important to highlight that while these cases were picked up later and outside of Wuhan, the genetics of the viruses were closer to the supposed ancestral bat virus, so in some sense this is a sample of an "earlier" part of the epidemic.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Viruses jumping from animals to humans is a very well-established theory. What makes this virus so different that you make the extraordinary claim that in this particular case, that didn't happen?
I think the idea is that that did happen, but it happened in a lab for studying bat viruses, rather than in a cave. SARS-1 escaped from labs numerous times.
They didn't say lab produced. The prevailing theory among those that are suspicious of the Wuhan lab is that it was a natural virus being studied in a lab from which it escaped.
The things is the Wuhan lab usually publishes on new viruses they discover and this one hadn't appeared in the literature previously. Which isn't to say that a Wuhan researcher couldn't have carried it back home from a bat cave in their lungs.
The popular hypothesis includes Gain of Function research in the lab to make it so contagious (which, per your claim, would mean that they would have published about it?). If it came from the cave directly into the lungs of patient zero, I'd think it'd effectively be considered zoonotic.
Being a regular listener to This Week in Virology where they've had a number of guests on who discussed this. The thing is the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a normal lab collaborating with researchers around the world. I'm sure it's possible that the local books could be cooked by the government but that doesn't change the fact that the collaborators also have the books. If they'd known that this particular virus would escape then obviously they wouldn't have shared info about it. But how would they know that unless they planned to release it? And planning to release it doesn't make sense for all the normal reasons.
Not lab produced. Simply lab leaked. There seems to be a conflation between "covid was cooked up in the Wuhan virology lab" and "covid was naturally occurring in bats being examined in the Wuhan virology lab, which ended up being ground zero for the pandemic due to poor containment practices." In this scenario, no one "gained from the virus" because releasing the virus was unintentional.
There's little hard evidence for the lab-leak theory, but there's little hard evidence for any other theory as well. There is however, a large amount of circumstantial evidence that makes the lab-leak theory more compelling.
- The earliest known cases have no connection to the wet market, meaning the wet market likely was not where a crossover event would have occurred. We've known this for nearly a year now.
- No actual intermediate host has been found, to this day.
- The closest naturally occurring coronavirus that has been discovered in the wild occurs in a type of bat that is thousands of kilometers away from Wuhan. However, this type of bat is among those being studied in the Wuhan Virology lab.
China has been extremely uncooperative in efforts to discover the origins of the outbreak:
- In the early days of the pandemic, after shutting down the wet market in question, they euthanized and sterilized the entirety of the market over the objections of international community, effectively making it impossible to know what intermediate host there might have been (though this was later made less important, given that earlier cases with no connection to the wet market were discovered)
- They resisted allowing international investigators into the country to probe for the origins of the virus for nearly a year. WHO investigators, who were only allowed into the country in recent months, have concluded that the virus likely came from wild animals and not the lab, but in the same breath says their report is inconclusive because they weren't actually much to work with by the Chinese governemnt. Additionally, questions have been raised about raw data regarding several hundred of the earliest known infections either going "missing" or simply being withheld by the CCP. 13 countries, including the US, today have basically called the report a joke given how little data they were given to work with
- US intelligence agencies have claimed to have some information backing the theory of a lab leak. This could simply be sabre-rattling, but its worth noting.
- Labs in the US stopped performing similar research to the one in Wuhan have stopped in the last decade or so specifically due to concerns over scenarios just like the current pandemic. On the other hand, the Wuhan lab in question was specifically called out for lacking the proper personnel and safety containment protocols for this type of research by international inspectors going back several years ago.
- Experts like former CDC Director Robert Redfield, who have worked extensively in virology, have gone on the record to say that the lab-leak theory is in their opinion the most likely given what we know.
Meanwhile, many attempts to discredit the lab-leak theory generally fall into one of two camps:
- People conflating "lab-leak" with "artificially created virus", which are not the same thing
- Reports from the WHO, who has shown extreme reticence to do or say anything critical of the Chinese government
Literally none of the above is concrete evidence of the lab-leak theory actually being the case. It's still entirely plausible there was a spillover the same way there has been with many other viruses in the past. But in total, all of the circumstantial evidence, combined with the lack of any real evidence regarding spillover theories, make it at least as likely as anything else we have.
Thanks for putting this together, it's odd how others are so quick to dismiss this line of thinking.
There's highly suspicious actions of the Chinese government along with the near-perfect human host tropism of the virus - but then also no evidence of zoonosis or any type of ongoing reservoir or circulation outside Wuhan.
It's bizarre to conclude that it's obviously just natural origin.
The more we learn the more it points to a lab leak, but Chinese commenters will deny it, claim racism, many on the left will say it’s simply not true, and yet here we are. Something caused it and it came from China. With a government that 100% cannot be trusted to tell the truth let alone defend human life, it’s more likely than not this was an accidental leak.
And the maximal delta between all 7 billion humans and the minimal version of many, let's say 3, makes such a statement unhelpfully limited in scope, while implying a controversy of thin air
Many on the right will say the lab leak theory is definitely true and has been 'proved'. So yep, we're in this together. I'm on the right, have been all my life, but nonsense is nonsense whoever is saying it.
Nothing in the article talks about how the virus first got into humans, beyond assuming an animal (not lab) source. It simply focuses on how unlikely it was, according to simulations, to survive the chain of initial infections long enough to fully develop into a pandemic.
The researchers discussed in the article believe the virus was present in a small number of people before the spread at the Wuhan market and view the spread there as among large numbers of people, not between the animals at the market and people there. So it's the crowds that were important there, not the seafood. Many countries around the world have densely crowded areas.
In order words, this was probably an unlikely event that could have happened in any country worldwide with densely crowded areas. It happened to be China this time, but that's coincidence and should not lead to anti-Chinese or anti-Asian hate.
Criticizing governments in China, the US, etc for aspects of their early pandemic handling is of course perfectly valid, as opposed to generalizing to the populations or ethnicities as a whole. But one should not discriminatorily focus on what China did wrong early on while ignoring the early mistakes of Western countries like the US, nor praise the US's mediocre pandemic results throughout most of 2020 while overlooking China's fast recovery through strict (albeit quite authoritarian) lockdowns.
For reference, I am American and not Chinese, but I still don't blame Chinese people generally for their government's bad handling of the early containment stage of the pandemic, nor for the coincidence that this virus spread from China.
> But one should not discriminatorily focus on what China did wrong early on while ignoring the early mistakes of Western countries like the US
this is wildly inaccurate. china single-handedly delayed world response by at least a month by jailing journalists, destroying samples, and lying to the WHO. comparing that to some degree of ineptitude in the US or anywhere else is nonsensical.
I agree the Chinese government did all of that. Meanwhile the US handling of it has caused hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths within the US alone, according to an interview given to CNN recently by Trump's own White House coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx where she said everything beyond the first ~100,000 could have been "mitigated or decreased substantially": https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/28/dr-deborah-b... To that statistic one must add the many consequences within the US other than deaths, the consequences across the rest of the world of US-led decisions like politicization of mask-wearing, and the many consequences of decisions taken by many other governments from outside of Asia (such as the COVID-denialist/anti-science presidents in Brazil and Mexico) that get overlooked when people hate on China regarding COVID-19.
My point is not to defend the Chinese government's horrible early misdeeds, but rather that the current global pandemic situation is not uniquely or even primarily China's fault. Sure, perfect handling by the Chinese government would have had a chance of containing this pandemic within their borders. And clearly the bad-faith actions of the Chinese government early on were far from that perfect handling. But even perfect handling would still have relied on luck, and success would not have been guaranteed. In any case no country should be measured against perfection. Most of the consequences over the pandemic taken as a whole are truly the result of attitudes and policy decisions from countries other than China, very much including the US.
[Edited to replace most references to "China" to "the Chinese government", to emphasize the differentiation between the government and the people. I am just as opposed to hate against the Chinese people as I am to the early pandemic handling of the Chinese government.]
>With a government that 100% cannot be trusted to tell the truth let alone defend human life,
Sure.
> it’s more likely than not this was an accidental leak.
This does not follow your other points. Just because it's within the realm of possibility that someone could have done it doesn't mean they did it. Just because someone is a bad guy doesn't mean you can attribute everything bad that happens in their house to them. Sometimes bad stuff happens and it's not anyone's fault.
There’s no evidence that it’s a deliberate leak, and it’s highly doubtful we will ever learn what exactly happened, but I think it’s highly likely that this came from a Chinese lab and the apologists for China decry this line of inquiry
That's fine, but you're treating your beliefs as facts and assuming that because you find it convincing that must be the reality of the situation. I was trying to explain how that's not necessarily the case.
Most likely they tried to cover it up and that led to it spreading more and around the world. If there was a true investigation, it would go up to upper/mid levels in the CCP and show how corrupt they were. In Asian cultures, saving face is everything.
I suppose you're right, but if you're paying Russian Roulette with 5 out of 6 bullets loaded I'm going to be more predisposed to thinking you were playing a really stupid game. I don't consider my lottery losses every time I buy a ticket unlucky, I just consider them the expected result.
The 70% is my issue with the article as well. That seems to indicate a 30% chance for the pandemic that actually happened, but that seems awfully high.
30% chance for a pandemic not necessarily this pandemic. Assuming they are correct the outbreak could have easily been noticed in a different city for example.
If this was flu, say, with a smaller k then you'd see a more normal exponential increase. With this it probably looked more like 1 person, 1 person, 1 person, 1 person, 1 person, 2 people, 30 people. Even absent protective measures most people who get Covid transmit to 1 person or nobody. But some spread it to dozens of others and a small number to hundreds.
I'd guess this is mostly driven by the orders of magnitude difference in peak viral load we see with SARS-CoV-2? But that's really something that needs research.
Zoonotic coronavirus infections from bats are pretty common in south east Asia when scientists have done antibody surveys of villagers. Most of those probably aren't well suited to human to human transmission. And if a virus spreads to infect everybody in a village and herd immunity is reached that's the end of that. But as commerce increases we're going to have to worry about taking more preventative measures.
Sewage sampling can look for a specific germ, and has been used to track Covid and its variants.
We aren't realistically yet at a tech level where we DNA sequence everyone's minor sniffle just in case it's something new. But not too terribly far off it.
There evidently already are mechanisms in place to respond to alerts of new notable breakout diseases by DNA sequencing them, that happened to Covid very early.
The way HN comes down so hard against the lab leak hypothesis is spooky. Opinion about this is thrown around so heavily. Credentials: NPR listener AKA elite understander of things? The tide of understanding the origin of this virus is turning as Chinese propaganda wears thin. Many of you may recieve your comeuppance and I hope you're embarassed by your sheepishness.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, is the problem.
Animal to human transmission is a thing that exists and is known. Much less extraordinary, much more mundane, but much more plausible.
Until there is extraordinary proof of your claim, and not just 'I feel it' type of arguments, I will steadfastly believe it started from a bat, as originally claimed.
If you have proof of your claim, and I have missed it, please provide it. I would appreciate it.
You speak on the virus as if you have expertise, or have studied the subject. Yet I suspect you, and so many posters here, are mere podcast listeners. The arrogance is almost a virus in spirit.
No, I don't speak as if I have expertise. I speak as someone who has been alive to experience various diseases that started from animals.
I'm not being arrogant, and I don't understand your attitude. You are making an absolutely extraordinary claim. This absolutely requires extraordinary proof.
Again, I would be really excited to read about any proof you have of your claims. Please link to something, I would appreciate it.
I've never even claimed it came from a lab. I'm commenting on YOUR arrogance and YOUR vehement dismissal that it didn't. You, despite never having studied viruses, are parroting publications and podcasts by your assertion that the lab leak hypothesis is "extraordinary" in the first place. The articles are just beginning to consider a lab leak, the podcasts are just beginning to pop up seriously considering it, the former CDC director has just expressed that he thinks it was a lab leak, and WHO now considers it still on the table. Careful, you may be embarrassed down the road.
Most posts which are critical of China get a lot of downvotes. The reason for that is speculation as HN does not publish statistics or transparency, but the issue of lab leak versus occurring outside of the lab has become so political that it has divided rational people who might otherwise question more honestly.
I sort of think the most likely origin is that some pangolin farmer from the back end of rural Yunnan was the first host but the virus couldn't explode until someone went to bring the pangolins to market in a city with real crowds.
Not impossible, but how plausible is that a farmer sells his animals in a single location in a big city more than 1000 km away? More likely the animals would be sold closer to his farm or sold in multiple big cities igniting separate outbreaks with distinct lineages.
In my experience, it is relatively plausible that the animals are sold in a single location, that far away. Granted, this is absolutely anecdata, but it does prove a point.
My experience: For decades, my father, my grandfather, and my great grandfather sold cattle via the Chicago markets. This is a trip of around 1000 km. This also originally started when our part of the US would have been no different than a very backwater part of a developing nation. No roads, no rail, no infrastructure, really, until you got to within 400-500 km of Chicago from where we live. And yet, they moved cattle that far to one single marketplace.
Interesting, thanks for the link. The livescience article mentions the possibility of false positives and doing different types of antibody testing to confirm, not only with potential WHO involvement. Do you know if there was any further testing? A quick search didn’t yield helpful results.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] thread[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32937679/
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang
Of course it would have been great if the Chinese were more transparent during those early days (and in general honestly), but it's pretty clear that the original outbreak was just the first smoke escaping from inside the burning roof: by late December it was already an uncontained epidemic that had spread far outside Wuhan.
We'd like something that would pick up the disease before it makes it to the epidemic status.
The probability of death for a healthy 30-something year old is lower than their probability to die in a car crash (1/10 to 1/100 of all cause mortality for that age group).
It’s a game of probability, of course, but it turns out that whistle blowers often suffer from “coincidences” and “low probability events”, and whenever that happens, I try to take note.
Wuhan lost a significant number of medical professionals presumably due to this.
Think about this: If he hadn't died, he probably would have received much less attention.
There were a few other eloquent Chinese whistle-blowers from the early days, Jan-Feb 2020, who have been silenced by government threats or by being detained, who do not have the public recognition of Dr Li - probably because they didn't die.
https://www.nbc26.com/news/coronavirus/cdc-estimates-covid-1...
The 0.02% number covers 20-49; It is lopsided, so it's likely that 30 is much less and 49 is much more ... ; So, it's not 1/100 or 1/1000 as I claimed, likely 1/10.
Your numbers are off by a factor of at least 50.
This data is being looked at and it seems there were already covid cases months before reports of cases in Wuhan https://www.francetvinfo.fr/replay-radio/samedi-investigatio....
a) The virus learned about humans over weeks or months in public with no one noticing
b) The virus learned about humans in a lab then leaked resulting in a fast moving pandemic
There were 2 known locations in China where coronaviruses were being studied - Beijing and Wuhan.
Now apply Bayesian analysis.
This is before you look at the coverup and the history of diseases escaping from research labs all over the world and the documented inadequate safety measures in the Chinese labs.
Anyway, the early cases that most closely match the supposed bat-virus ancestor aren't even from the same province as the Wuhan virus lab.
Which province were they from? I know that related samples were found in bat guano from Yunnan province, but I've never heard of earlier human cases in another province.
The precise timeline of the outbreak is in any case very sketchy due to the natural circumstance that nobody was testing for it before the Wuhan outbreak, but of course the first time you find something doesn't have to be the first time you could have found it.
In https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2004999117 they report that (at the time) the known samples closest to the bat progenitor were collected 3-4 weeks after the outbreak was declared, and could be connected to a cluster (cluster A) of cases connected to Guangdong detected starting from two weeks after the outbreak.
It's important to highlight that while these cases were picked up later and outside of Wuhan, the genetics of the viruses were closer to the supposed ancestral bat virus, so in some sense this is a sample of an "earlier" part of the epidemic.
[1] https://eu.usatoday.com/in-depth/opinion/2021/03/22/why-covi...
Also, who gained from the virus?
Also, Occams Razor has nothing to do with 'who gained' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
There's little hard evidence for the lab-leak theory, but there's little hard evidence for any other theory as well. There is however, a large amount of circumstantial evidence that makes the lab-leak theory more compelling.
China has been extremely uncooperative in efforts to discover the origins of the outbreak: - Experts like former CDC Director Robert Redfield, who have worked extensively in virology, have gone on the record to say that the lab-leak theory is in their opinion the most likely given what we know.Meanwhile, many attempts to discredit the lab-leak theory generally fall into one of two camps:
Literally none of the above is concrete evidence of the lab-leak theory actually being the case. It's still entirely plausible there was a spillover the same way there has been with many other viruses in the past. But in total, all of the circumstantial evidence, combined with the lack of any real evidence regarding spillover theories, make it at least as likely as anything else we have.There's highly suspicious actions of the Chinese government along with the near-perfect human host tropism of the virus - but then also no evidence of zoonosis or any type of ongoing reservoir or circulation outside Wuhan.
It's bizarre to conclude that it's obviously just natural origin.
It's not team sports, it's world issues.
The researchers discussed in the article believe the virus was present in a small number of people before the spread at the Wuhan market and view the spread there as among large numbers of people, not between the animals at the market and people there. So it's the crowds that were important there, not the seafood. Many countries around the world have densely crowded areas.
In order words, this was probably an unlikely event that could have happened in any country worldwide with densely crowded areas. It happened to be China this time, but that's coincidence and should not lead to anti-Chinese or anti-Asian hate.
Criticizing governments in China, the US, etc for aspects of their early pandemic handling is of course perfectly valid, as opposed to generalizing to the populations or ethnicities as a whole. But one should not discriminatorily focus on what China did wrong early on while ignoring the early mistakes of Western countries like the US, nor praise the US's mediocre pandemic results throughout most of 2020 while overlooking China's fast recovery through strict (albeit quite authoritarian) lockdowns.
For reference, I am American and not Chinese, but I still don't blame Chinese people generally for their government's bad handling of the early containment stage of the pandemic, nor for the coincidence that this virus spread from China.
this is wildly inaccurate. china single-handedly delayed world response by at least a month by jailing journalists, destroying samples, and lying to the WHO. comparing that to some degree of ineptitude in the US or anywhere else is nonsensical.
My point is not to defend the Chinese government's horrible early misdeeds, but rather that the current global pandemic situation is not uniquely or even primarily China's fault. Sure, perfect handling by the Chinese government would have had a chance of containing this pandemic within their borders. And clearly the bad-faith actions of the Chinese government early on were far from that perfect handling. But even perfect handling would still have relied on luck, and success would not have been guaranteed. In any case no country should be measured against perfection. Most of the consequences over the pandemic taken as a whole are truly the result of attitudes and policy decisions from countries other than China, very much including the US.
[Edited to replace most references to "China" to "the Chinese government", to emphasize the differentiation between the government and the people. I am just as opposed to hate against the Chinese people as I am to the early pandemic handling of the Chinese government.]
Yes
> and it came from China.
Yes, it seems that way.
>With a government that 100% cannot be trusted to tell the truth let alone defend human life,
Sure.
> it’s more likely than not this was an accidental leak.
This does not follow your other points. Just because it's within the realm of possibility that someone could have done it doesn't mean they did it. Just because someone is a bad guy doesn't mean you can attribute everything bad that happens in their house to them. Sometimes bad stuff happens and it's not anyone's fault.
Most likely they tried to cover it up and that led to it spreading more and around the world. If there was a true investigation, it would go up to upper/mid levels in the CCP and show how corrupt they were. In Asian cultures, saving face is everything.
I don't think we were unlucky at all. If there was a 70% chance of this petering out it doesn't take a lot of tries to get one that doesn't.
I'd guess this is mostly driven by the orders of magnitude difference in peak viral load we see with SARS-CoV-2? But that's really something that needs research.
And of people that work with livestock.
Setting it up would be hard, and pulling the interesting data out of the firehouse would likely be hard.
We aren't realistically yet at a tech level where we DNA sequence everyone's minor sniffle just in case it's something new. But not too terribly far off it.
There evidently already are mechanisms in place to respond to alerts of new notable breakout diseases by DNA sequencing them, that happened to Covid very early.
https://www.niaid.nih.gov/research/emerging-infectious-disea...
Animal to human transmission is a thing that exists and is known. Much less extraordinary, much more mundane, but much more plausible.
Until there is extraordinary proof of your claim, and not just 'I feel it' type of arguments, I will steadfastly believe it started from a bat, as originally claimed.
If you have proof of your claim, and I have missed it, please provide it. I would appreciate it.
I'm not being arrogant, and I don't understand your attitude. You are making an absolutely extraordinary claim. This absolutely requires extraordinary proof.
Again, I would be really excited to read about any proof you have of your claims. Please link to something, I would appreciate it.
My experience: For decades, my father, my grandfather, and my great grandfather sold cattle via the Chicago markets. This is a trip of around 1000 km. This also originally started when our part of the US would have been no different than a very backwater part of a developing nation. No roads, no rail, no infrastructure, really, until you got to within 400-500 km of Chicago from where we live. And yet, they moved cattle that far to one single marketplace.
There's some good points about jumping to conclusions in this article.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0300891620987756