It has been, I think, 5 days since the last case in Wuhan (guess there's a debate about a case that may have occurred yesterday/today, but jury's out on that one based on media reports).
That said, if the 5 days is true, then you wouldn't expect them to remove the lockdown until they know they've starved the virus for the incubation period (I think it's generally accepted that 14 days is the number, but that there are potentially longer outliers). By that logic, you wouldn't expect them to lift the lockdown materially for another 9 days and even then you would expect them to only gradually lift restrictions while they ensure no new cases emerge.
I'm sure there are media outlets saying China has "defeated" the virus, but from what I've read they've contained it, kept new infections to a minimum (attributing all at this point to imported cases) and are still on varying degrees of lockdown. And this is hardly reputable, but I follow people on Instagram who are in Shanghai and folks there still talk as if things are far from normal... There are still restrictions on what you can do, where you can go.
They didn't stop testing. However the "zero new cases" reports are misleading. Various reports showed that there are a few positive testing results in Wuhan each day, but because they are asymptomatic, they are not being considered as "case".
On the positive side, it shows that Wuhan now have enough testing capacity to test almost every single one who walked in a hospital even they are seeking medical help for completely different issues.
> The lockdown is in effect and the moment it's taken down, we'll see a second wave. No?
Who knows, I think they have no idea and are just keeping things as they are to avoid having Wuhan in the news. Would make awful press to admit to any new cases in Wuhan.
Are other major metropolises locked down similarly? Beijing, Shanghai?
In general, is it credible that China has had no new cases other than those so called "imported from outside"? Sounds like propaganda to me.
Think it's worth reading this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22593771) from a few days ago and in particular watching the whole Nanjing video. If it is accurate (or was accurate (because from other commenters the restrictions are loosening daily)), you can really get a sense of how extraordinary the Chinese efforts to combat this have been.
Nanjing is a city of 8M people so roughly the size of Wuhan. I came away from it thinking that the numbers coming out of China could very well be credible given how strict movement/social distancing/etc is/has been. Of course that is not Wuhan, which is why the stricter lockdown still going on in Wuhan would seem to make sense (but I can't vouch for the authenticity of any of this).
Everyone wears a mask in public places, this is mandatory. Before entering many/most buildings (private or public) your body temperature is measured. In most private compounds non-resident people cannot enter without a solid reason. Schools are closed. A gym I know was closed for weeks and restarted at the beginning of March in restricted mode (no group class, simultaneous private courses are under quota, masks are mandatory at all times...), and restrictions are progressively lifted (reduced group classes will soon restart...).
> Are other major metropolises locked down similarly? Beijing, Shanghai?
Kuala Lumpur has all unessential services and schools closed. Supermarkets are open.
People aren't allowed outside apart from going to work or the shops. Police are enforcing this and they've brought in the Army to help stop people spending time in parks.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
And the American government in general killed half a million Iraqis, and imprisons millions of African Americans, and, and, and - yet...
Those facts are completely irrelevant to the conversation about what the government's motives for its handling of COVID-19 are. Most of us restrain ourselves from bringing them up in every discussion of American domestic policy. It's off-topic, it invites a bunch of whataboutism, and it baits nationalistic arguments. It's more on-topic in threads on policing, surveillance, civil rights struggles, islamophobia, etc.
I think it might be a good idea to avoid bringing up facts you yourself consider irrelevant. EDIT: By which I mean, cut it from the front of your comment, which seems to be getting better with every edit.
I fail to see how "might actively be murdering and imprisoning innocent people" is an invalid counterpoint to "wants to save lives".
I would accept the same argument if someone were to suggest that the US releasing low security prisoners during this crisis were done to relieve the burden of imprisonment on minorities, when it would clearly be done primarily to prevent the prison population from becoming massively infected.
If they didn't care, they could've just killed them all instead of spending effort on indoctrinating them. The Chinese government does understand proportionality. Wrongthink is countered with thought policing, not genocide.
This is the thing that is so crazy about the economic suicide and authoritarian lockdowns we are all doing.
Evidence from China and Italy is that they don't actually work. It's been three months, and China still can't let people leave their front door or the virus will return full force, with no expectations that another month or even another year of lockdown will help.
In Italy, with two weeks of lockdown, the exponential growth of new infections hasn't even slowed. Now they are predicting that "just three more weeks" and the exponential growth might start to slightly decline.
Wealth and freedom are declining around the world, but it doesn't even slow the virus' spread.
Meanwhile, places like Korea have no trouble stopping the virus without the authoritarianism.
And yet, all people here call for is ever-more economic destruction, and ever more authoritarian controls, all to no detectable effect. Except, of course, the end of our free and prosperous societies.
> Evidence from China and Italy is that they don't actually work.
Don’t work for what purpose? They work well at shutting down the virus in the short term. In Wuhan the reproductive number of the virus is estimated to have dropped from above 3 to ~0.3 after the lockdown.
> In Italy, with two weeks of lockdown, the exponential growth of new infections hasn't even slowed
This is definitely not true. If you plot Italian cases or deaths on a logarithmic scale it’s easy to see the curve slowly bending down. Keep in mind it takes ~2 weeks for public health interventions to start showing up in data about identified cases, and ~3 weeks for them to show up in data about deaths.
> places like Korea have no trouble stopping the virus without the authoritarianism
Places like South Korea have had plenty of “trouble”, but have stopped transmission through nationwide testing, contact tracing, isolation, and quarantine, along with early school closures and a mass social distancing effort among the public, pervasive use of face masks, etc.
The South Korean public health response (and we might add also Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore) was much faster and more decisive than the response in the US or Europe. As a result they have avoided the situation of widespread community spread, and not needed to undertake a total societal shutdown as became necessary in Hubei or Italy.
What other countries should be learning from South Korea is to act quickly and stay on top of the virus before it gets out of control.
The Wuhan lockdown clearly worked insofar as it stopped the exponential spread of the epidemic in the short term, saving millions of lives throughout China and by now allowing temporary hospitals to empty, overworked imported medical staff to return home, transportation networks to restart, etc.
Over the coming months economic activity should slowly ramp up (already has in most of the country), hopefully without restarting widespread community spread of the virus.
Yes this is an extremely economically painful kind of response, more or less pausing all economic activity for months. But if the alternative is the death of >1% of the population, all drowning alone at home while the overwhelmed medical system collapses, it’s hard to counterfactually guess at the relative effects on the economy.
I sure wish you wouldn’t get downvoted. People on forums like HN refuse to entertain that this might not be the end of the world and perhaps officials are overreacting. I mean face it, the media, social media, forums like this... everybody is blasting down into our heads 24/7 that the end is near for at least a week in the states. I get we are all panicking but I cannot help but to feel that we’ve created a gigantic echo chamber.
My skepticism will wane when I see videos of hospitals all across the country with patients in the halls. Until than, we really have no clue what happens next.
I hardly know how to tackle the current ordeal, however in order to prevent such disaster we may quit living in highly densely populated areas, and decentralize power in order to let local people react adequately.
How do you simultaneously decentralize power right down to the local level, and then tell people to do as you say, or even expect everyone to co-operate on a common goal? All it takes is one group having extremely different ideas to break the cohesion. Its just wishful thinking IMHO. Anti-vaxers can only come about when one is granted the autonomy of parenting ones child and making decisions about their immunizations.
A local authority is able to tell people to do as it says. It is even more efficient at this than a central one, as it usually tries harder to obtain a consensus (people willing to be involved are, nobody has to remain a mere cog) because it cannot coerce as efficiently as a central gov (for various reasons, one being that transforming locals into guards of other locals is difficult, another that it is more easy to escape from a little group...).
The common goal is to survive and to pursue the quest for happiness, I doubt it is better set by a central government.
As for the approach (the way to tackle the problem), having groups choosing various ways is a way to discover what works or not, and which new challenges are raised by each approach. When everybody everywhere applies the same approach, everything may break simultaneously if it is not the perfect approach (perfect approaches are pretty rare), and progress towards new solutions is slow.
>A local authority is able to tell people to do as it says. It is even more efficient at this than a central one, as it usually tries harder to obtain a consensus (people willing to be involved are, nobody has to remain a mere cog) because it cannot coerce as efficiently as a central gov (for various reasons, one being that transforming locals into guards of other locals is difficult, another that it is more easy to escape from a little group...).
You're responding to something else. The point I made is that you WANT to coerce people into vaccinating their kids, into educating their kids, etc, etc. Those should not be things where one crosses their fingers and hopes that people get convinced into doing that.
>The common goal is to survive and to pursue the quest for happiness, I doubt it is better set by a central government.
Sorry, are we even talking about the same thing here? I thought the conversation was about healthcare/vaccination/infectious diseases/.
>As for the approach (the way to tackle the problem), having groups choosing various ways is a way to discover what works or not, and which new challenges are raised by each approach. When everybody everywhere applies the same approach, everything may break simultaneously if it is not the perfect approach (perfect approaches are pretty rare), and progress towards new solutions is slow.
Okay, but nothing about having a central government precludes you from running local experiments w.r.t new policy. I believe RCT economics received a nobel prize either last year or the year before that.
The significance of China flattening the curve was never that Covid was defeated. This thing will have a much longer impact than that. It was that their health infrastructure could keep up with ICU demand, i.e., they have a death rate trending towards 0.5-1% instead of 4-6%.
Until there is a vaccine or the entire remaining population develops some immunity, the disease is still around and lockdown will have to be lifted gradually to keep the number of new cases low enough that the cases that need intense care can get it.
Total not an expert in this area or really qualified to comment. But I think if they can get the known case load low enough, and continue aggressive testing and contact tracing, they may be able to lift the lockdown. Then aggressively isolate anyone who's come into contact with a known case.
If that doesn't work, restart the lockdown.
The big risk my be re-importing it back from other parts of the world who've been much less successful at containing this.
R0 goes down with rising temps and humidity. Covid has a pretty high R0 to begin with, so unlike flu and colds that almost disappear in summer, covid will most likely be slightly less contagious than in winter (people being more outdoors helps too). That’s not enough to make it not spread in warm countries now, but it will likely help some bad areas in colder climates such as New York or Germany.
There are flu cases in summer, just not as many as winter. Without a control country to compare we don't know if Australia would have many more cases were it winter there.
Have you not heard of someone having the flu in the summer? It’s possible, just less common than during winter months. We suspect the same for Covid-19.
So far South Korea and Japan aren't showing any second wave and they have probably more travel/biz links with Wuhan than anyone else...so fingers crossed. Keep an eye on them.
But... hospital and testing capabilities are building day by day, the quarantine is buying time
It comes back, but the second time around we can isolate the right people due to ubiquitous testing, have more hospital beds and more knowledge on how to treat the sick, and are that much closer to a vaccine
“For context, most people live in "neighborhoods" comprised of several high rise apartments in a compact area w/ a shared green space (see pic).”
Off-topic I know, but this is a pretty good description of the Sim City “donut” shape that was essential to building a megalopolis and winning the game. You built residential units around a park center, and with the right conditions that developed into white high-rises like those in her linked picture.
For years experts have warned that another SARS-like virus is going to come out of China, due to their animal husbandry practices and culture of eating certain animals.
Then this disease appears, and China initially tries to suppress news of it. They deny it's an issue. Wasting valuable time and allowing it spread unchecked to the rest of the world.
Then, about three months ago they lock down Wuhan to contain it (an area with millions of people I think?) This means, based on this Twitter thread, that residents can't even walk outside. So, like being incarcerated?
And, people's wages are getting paid still, but as loans they'll owe when this is all over. So, like debt?
What boggles my mind is all the positive news coverage of this. Why are people fawning over this?
China, as with other countries, hss made errors and seen successes in addressing COVID-19. Systemic strengths and weaknesses have been exposed. A reasonable commentary expresses both sides.
Truth is nonideological.
As much as China squandered weeks, possibly months of advanced warning, we've seen precisely that script repeated around the world, across a wide range of cultures, governmental systems, economic systems, and ideologies.
With a few notable exceptions: Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan RoC, and South Korea most notably.
This epidemic is unprecedented since WWII, and everyone is making up their response (including numerous ineffective ones) as it develops. Most often there are no good options, only least bad ones.
Nobody but the Chinese were throwing their justice system at people for merely indicating there might be a problem. That's very different than incompetence.
meta: Over these past four years I've seen a growing number of people interpreting the most nuanced, neutral statements as 'apologist', 'biased', 'lobbying', 'spam', 'politically motivated'. I don't think this has always been the case, especially on HN.
It's not just skepticism, that's for sure. How do I put it? It's like assuming there are sides when there are no sides. I'm curious, is there a word for this?
I like this. Polarization is a pretty good characterization. People are just not treating neutral views as neutral anymore.
Food for thought: perhaps people treating everything as fake news is an unfortunate adverse effect of all the messaging about the dangers of not recognizing fake news.
As far as I understand, outrage culture is about shunning popular folks for their imperfect human morality. Could you (or someone else) elaborate on how this is related to this, well, let's call it erosion of neutrality?
Thanks for the link, I was wondering if Scott touched on this. Seems to be an adjacent topic but it's relevant nonetheless.
my tldr of that post: in the context of ideological/political theory, mistake theorists are engineers who want results, conflict theorists are warmongers who want to win.
Perhaps seeing bias in everything is just one of those warmongering traits -- because trust me, it's really hard to win against a neutral point of view.
Because there is value in making good decisions after a series of bad ones. Wuhan has stopped more infections, which is to be applauded.
Moving forward, we can criticize the reasons in the post mortem. However, if we are looking to find the truth, we cannot start with blame. We all know how blame causes people to cover their ass and inhibits learning.
The news I’ve seen has been calling it “draconian.”
e.g.
“China has used draconian measures to contain the spread of the virus, including locking down Hubei province and more recently stepping up measures to screen and quarantine overseas arrivals.” Reuters (NYTimes?) https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/03/21/world/asia/21reut...
It's awful, but I feel it's not fair to single out China for this. I don't see the rest of the world doing much better of a job, especially in Brazil where Bolsonaro is still going on television to downplay the situation and actively making it harder for state governors to do the right thing (make people stay the fuck home, if you pardon my French).
It is absolutely fair to single them out. This would not be happening if not for circumstances specific to their culture and industry. They had warning 20 years ago with SARS1, and they did nothing to prevent this, even though the solutions would basically be "don't store live animals next to each other in wet markets". Now we all pay the price.
Our world would be better with more accountability. And in this case there is one specific party who fucked up worse than all the rest, particularly given their 20 year notice.
And not to pile on, but, what can you even criticize China over? They are very much a real super power now, they get away with stuff in the same fashion as America. Jail their civilians in camps, threaten Hong Kong, steal foreign intellectual property, and now possibly mishandle the onset of a pandemic.
All very difficult stuff to get international accountability on, they’ve really joined the super power ‘I-do-whatever-I-want’ club nicely.
Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely not saying China is not to be criticized. I just feel like everyone is being quick to jump on them and forgetting about the more tangible and immediate issues, which is their own governments doing the exact same thing.
That's fair, but we have our share of blame for letting this get out of control. We knew what this virus could do as well, and instead of acting accordingly we're just not.
Strip away media narrative on both sides, an impartial timeline would be:
Wuhan medical community recognized a new pneumonia of unclear cause in late December during winter and the height of influenza season. The novel Corona Virus was identified, WHO was notified, the genome was sequenced. This took roughly 1 week. Then it took 3 more weeks of "stability management" before central government quarantined WuHan and essentially shutdown the entire country right before the most important holiday of the year and the largest annual human migration.
4 weeks for identification to evaluation to 3 months of aggressive techno-authoritarian quarantine, and assuming 2nd wave and import cases can be managed until the vaccine - China just demonstrated the first civilization model in human history to be able to suppress a virus of this magnitude in large countries. Other countries are only recently adopting the war analogy, China executed it on a dime. How they'll fair in rebooting society is unknown.
Was there missteps? Yes. Could they have done better? Not by much IMO. Every misstep with Chinese characteristics is being repeated just as worst in other countries with their cultural characteristics. The overall response as been not as agile (if there a response at all), despite having ample notice and more information.
The retrospect of this global health crisis is going to be interesting, China and a handful of islands managed to successful crush the curve, complacent developed countries may or may not successful spread the curve, and all the developing countries get rapid herd immunity because like the Spanish flu, they have no other choice. 1.4 billion people without herd immunity among a globalized world with immunity is going to be a conundrum though.
Lots of people left Wuhan before the lockdown though. Also lots of people still travelled for the Chinese New Year internally. January 10th is the beginning of travel season, Wuhan was locked down on the 23rd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%932...
Locking down Hubei after 600 cases / ~3weeks is extremely expedient for an utterly unprecedented response. NYC was at 10k+ cases before they implement a light lock down, 60 days after Hubei, they're still meandering through half-measures. That's a comparatively severe response outside of China.
Many considerations in a region of 60million, i.e Jan 17th was the regional two sessions meeting. The early migration and WuHan being regional hub no doubt precipitated the decision to lock-down that fast. China locked down most of the country after ~30 days. Outside of a few city-states or island nations, we have ample counter-examples that no other country has responded as agile as China. Many don't even have a meaning response plan in place.
Herd community for covid19
is speculation right? There is no proof that that will happen is there? It is a (dangerous) gamble at this point as I understand it.
Assuming patients can't get reinfected with the virus, then herd immunity will definitely work.
But for herd immunity to occur, a very large portion of the herd needs to get infected. And I would assume that proportion is greater, the more infectious a disease is.
The idea with the lockdowns is to keep the rate of infection slow enough that hospitals can handle the influx of cases.
The earliest known case, just as the mid-November suspected cases you cited, is a suspected case. If you read the original paper claiming the Dec 1 case, you are going to see they made the conclusion based on symptoms and epidemiology. This is something which can only happen retrospectively. It does not mean someone can magically realize there is a novel virus when the first few patients just showed up.
The health officials surely isn't (and won't be) curious about isolated flu-like cases, they can't because there are simply too many such patients, to the point it is not realistic to track them all.
The doctors who saw these cases are certainly curious, but unless one sees a number of related cases with similar symptoms, "novel infectious disease" would not be among the first few explanations one turns to. There are simply too many other possible reasons (and more probable in routines) for flu-like symptoms. Unfortunately due to the nature of this virus early cases are indeed pretty isolated.
From what I read, the virus was first detected by an mNGS run in late Dec, which as far is still a "fuck I believe this must be caused by microbe but I'm seriously out of idea what could this be"-thing to Chinese doctors.
The report Dr. Li tried to send out is one of the mNGS report I mentioned above, it happened on Dec 30, i.e. late Dec.
The mNGS run itself happened around Dec 26 if you look at the original photo Dr. Li posted.
Could you please highlight where in this news article a date earlier than late December (like, Dec 1 or Dec 8 as you said) was mentioned? It brings a valid point, that China government sat on the problem for three weeks, but the timeline does not match yours.
Even all you claimed stand, China stop its whole country in Jan and achieved 0 domestic new case in 2 months. This is already the biggest positive news.
Speaking of that:
- Hongkong and Palau has much worse eating wild animal habit than Wuhan.
- Hundreds of Wuhan gov officials got punished due to inefficient response, more investigation is still continuing.
- First case reported at end of Dec, China CDC shared out coronavirus gen sequence in Jan, Wuhan locked down in Jan, but the most of the world simply did nothing in the upcoming 3 months and keep spreading unchecked globally even today.
> - Hongkong and Palau has much worse eating wild animal habit than Wuhan.
Curious how you get this impression, do you have specific examples in mind? For example, bats, wolves and civet cats are consumed in Wuhan, which is not the case in Hong Kong.
> - Hundreds of Wuhan gov officials got punished due to inefficient response, more investigation is still continuing.
On the flip side, I wonder how the cases for the eight whistleblowers reprimanded by local authorities, including Li Wenliang, are being investigated. More importantly, the real question is: does it actually solve the problem? Replacing officials (especially the local ones) is easy, solving the root cause (lack of accountability) is hard.
> Curious how you get this impression, do you have specific examples in mind? For example, bats, wolves and civet cats are consumed in Wuhan, which is not the case in Hong Kong.
The estimated IFR for this coronavirus is ~.05 to 0.1%. Even if it turns out to be something extreme, like 0.5%, it's not a big deal for the vast, vast majority of the population. But lockdowns and economic catastrophe are. They are a big deal for everyone. In this case the needs of the many are being overridden by the needs of the few.
If the shutdowns/lockdowns go for more than 4 weeks, I think we'd have been better off just letting the disease run wild. More people will die from the economic issues at that point. Might be too late already.
The numbers are higher than that. From Wikipedia today:
> "The case fatality rate (CFR) depends on the availability of healthcare, the typical age and health problems within the population, and the number of undiagnosed cases. Preliminary research has yielded case fatality rate numbers between 2% and 3%; in January 2020 the WHO suggested that the case fatality rate was approximately 3%, and 2% in February 2020 in Hubei. Other CFR numbers, which adjust for differences in time of confirmation, death or remission but are not peer reviewed, are respectively 7% and 33% for people in Wuhan 31 January. An unreviewed preprint of 55 deaths noted that early estimates of mortality may be too high as asymptomatic infections are missed. They estimated a mean infection fatality ratio (IFR, the mortality among infected) ranging from 0.8% to 0.9%. A peer-reviewed article published on 19 March estimated the overall symptomatic case fatality risk as 1.4% (IQR 0.9–2.1%). The outbreak in 2019–2020 has caused at least 335,974 confirmed infections and 14,641 deaths."
Current predictions are that letting the disease run wild would result in millions or tens of millions of deaths, and on top of that another large number of people walking around (slowly) with serious lung damage. Consider this:
> "The Hong Kong Hospital Authority found a drop of 20% to 30% in lung capacity in some people who recovered from the disease, and lung scans suggested organ damage."
There is a stream of academic papers coming out that show the original estimates are extremely high. I’ve seen CFR estimates getting into the 0.6% range. It is not at all unreasonable to see that number go down even further with more testing.
If they are estimates, it's not at all unreasonable to see the number go down or up.
But in any case, the CFR estimates are also changing as a function of learning more about how to treat, and hospital capacity relative to caseload.
I was replying about the "let it rip through the population" scenario, without slowing it down, which basically means don't treat the majority of severe cases in hospital (because the hospitals would be totally overwhelmed in that scenario). The CFR would be higher.
US had a 2 month warning. Our president and CDC kept downplaying it like it was nothing. Trump was saving face for a long time trying to not harm the stock market while blatantly lying to us.
How is this any different from what China did?
At-least China has gotten things under control, the west is on fire. Italy is being decimated and being overwhelmed.
> the govt mandated employers must still pay salaries while [the workers are] in quarantine. As a reaction, some employers are requiring workers to make up this pay once they come back... effectively a loan.
So how are the workers going to pay it back? I presume it's going to be a pay cut for the next n months until it's all made up for. While that's better than not getting paid at all, the unexpected pay cut might be problematic for households that live paycheck to paycheck (not sure how prevalent that is in china), and for the consumer economy. Also, are what happens if the employee simply quits? Are those debts legal debts?
For employees on the edge making 5-10 RMB/hour, that will be a huge burden for them. In China you need a signed/stamped release from your previous employer before you can take a new job, so they could just hold that back if there are any debts to make up.
"Ruling" is too strong a word but that's probably the best way. HN's guidelines call for original sources: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."
If there were a community consensus that threadreaderapp.com links are better than the equivalent twitter.com links, we could maybe override that, but there's no such consensus.
threadreaderapp is fast and almost always works unlike Twitter links that simply show "try again" because I block referer headers from being sent to their servers.
> Our CSRF protection mechanism for POST requests checks that the origin and referer headers of the request are sourced from Twitter. Since we knew this to be effective for POSTs, we considered how we could implement this for GET requests.
> This proved effective in addressing the vulnerability, but it prevented this initial load of the website. You might load Twitter from a Google search result or by typing the url into the browser. To address this case, we created a blank page on twitter.com which did nothing but reload itself. Upon reload, the referer would be set to twitter.com, and so it would load correctly.
I have to agree that threadreader is obviously better now: it actually shows you the thread. Twitter at some point in the past few months switched to showing unrelated tweets by the same user instead of the whole thread, requiring you to spot the link to expand it.
My main concern is that Twitter accessory services tend to die due to business model or changes in Twitter's API. Linking to one instead of the tweet increases the chance of a dead link in the future. Even if it's better now, it stands a good chance of being worse in the long run.
There is evidence that there virus was not engineered. The spike protein is completely novel and existing techniques for finding bonding proteins do not see this virus as a good binding candidate.
It is conceivable that the lab was studying bat coronavirus and accidentally released it, but Occam's razor suggests that the market where most early patients contacted the virus, similar to the market where SARS evolved, is the actual source.
There's a decent amount of evidence to suggest it did, and China has already shown themselves unreliable (putting it mildly) regarding information about the virus. I don't think you have a leg to stand on if you propose to speak with such certainty.
No evidence here, but it shouldn't be dismissed either.
From Wikipedia ..
> Coronavirus research
In 2005, a group including researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology published research into the origin of the SARS coronavirus, finding that China's horseshoe bats are natural reservoirs of SARS-like coronaviruses.[6] Continuing this work over a period of years, researchers from the Institute sampled thousands of horseshoe bats in locations across China, isolating over 300 bat coronavirus sequences.[7]
In 2015, the Institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect HeLa. A team from the Institute engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.[8][9]
"China’s only Level 4 microbiology lab that is equipped to handle deadly coronaviruses, called the National Biosafety Laboratory, is part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology." In fact, when all this started, China was quite open about the lab story. Only when the containment failed, CCP decided to erase the lab story from the news.
In response to people who are saying, "it's just because Chinese people eat weird food that the virus started in Wuhan," here's a much more thoughtful article about how the shape of the global markets contributed to the shape of this pandemic:
The lockdown is in effect and the moment it's taken down, we'll see a second wave. No?