
Wuhan lab phone records show 'possible shutdown' in October - tankenmate
https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/wuhan-lab-phone-records-show-possible-shutdown-in-october-20200510-p54rid.html
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CyanLite2
Good grief, so much propaganda here. This is HackerNews not FoxNews.

The 2019 Military World Games, officially known as the 7th CISM Military World
Games and commonly known as Wuhan 2019, was held from October 18–27, 2019 in
Wuhan, Hubei, China.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Military_World_Games](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Military_World_Games)

This is why the roads were closed and phone usage changed its normal patterns.

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btown
The article, though, describes dates that do not overlap the games:

> The report, carried out by private experts, suggested there may have been a
> "hazardous event", specifically at the institute's National Biosafety
> Laboratory, between October 6 and 11. Analysis of mobile phone data from
> around the institute also suggested roadblocks were in place between October
> 14 and 19.

This doesn't rule out the possibility that the discrepancy comes from a drill
or other preparation for the games. However, it does make this information
worthy of deeper investigation.

~~~
valuearb
The data is a small subset of actual cell phone use, making it misleading and
useless.

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kdtsh
>Experts urged caution, suggesting the report may be based on limited
commercially available mobile phone data, and that there could be other
reasons for varying levels of phone usage.

Is there much more to it than this? Much more will be read into this than
should be. Investigate by all means, but everyone should really know that
there’s only one answer that the present US administration is interested in
with this investigation - that this virus did not develop but was released -
the good intentions of researchers be damned.

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mytailorisrich
It's much easier to write a report when you're told what conclusions to reach
beforehand.

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mytailorisrich
That's a typical FUD campaign. Reality is irrelevant to the narrative, and
discussion is railroaded into drawing conclusions while accepting the premise
without questions.

It's Iraq's WMDs all over again but even weirder because it is a topic that
has very little practical value. This is purely political.

Now, if the US can really pinpoint mobile phone calls within a building, in
the middle of China, surely that should be the scoop here.

(Btw, the first week of October is a national holiday in China, and the
Military World Games were held in Wuhan later that month)

~~~
CyanLite2
This is what scares me the most--more so than the virus itself. Stupid
Americans believing stupid conspiracy theories and rushing to war just to get
an idiot re-elected.

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mytailorisrich
The US cannot go to war with China. So that's at least a little relief.

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foxyv
Hmm, seems like cherry picking. How often do these events occur? Did it happen
in September, August, etc? Did it happen last year at the same time? Seems a
bit premature to draw conclusions immediately one way or the other.

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sdiq
Assuming this is true knowing that there is no way to definitively find out,
would it have been possible for China to limit the spread at the time? If is
was true and they were open and transparent about it?

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thawaway1837
So the whole 5 eyes report has basically been exposed as likely a fabrication
at best, and they are coming up with some other nonsense now.

It’s clear FUD.

And all this does not change the fact that whether it escaped a lab or not is
completely irrelevant (other than the fact that it makes the Trump admins
decision to pull US researchers from the lab even worse, since if they hadn’t
pulled them to save peanuts, and it did escape from a lab, the US and the
world would have been aware of this in October).

There is no reason to believe Western countries, many of which did not start
acting until late March although information about the CoronaVirus has existed
since the beginning of the year at the latest, and Asian countries had already
started acting on it in mid Jan to Feb, would have behaved any differently.

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Waterluvian
What is the mechanism that enabled US intelligence to get this phone data?

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xxpor
I wouldn't be shocked if it came from NRO satellite data. The frequencies cell
phones operate at will readily escape to space.

