This just seems so bogus. Suggesting the virus was circulating in China as early as August but was being covered up?
It’s the 21st century. There were many direct flights between Wuhan and the United States every day, as well as with other countries. If the virus were circulating in august that would have given it months to spread to the USA. We know from antibody studies and the lack of deaths that didn’t happen - the virus didn’t spread widely until 2020.
Vietnam has a population of 100 million and a land border with China. They activated their pandemic response in January and have had ZERO coronavirus deaths. Taiwan, again, activated their response on December 31, 2019, and has had only 7 deaths from COVID-19. These numbers are impossible to square with the idea that COVID-19 was in wide circulation in the Chinese population in August or September.
Therefore the idea that it was circulating in human-to-human transmission in China as early as 4 months before 2020 just can’t make sense.
This seems like science in service of politics or publicity - it’s already being breathlessly used as proof that China somehow covered up the virus for months as an attack on western civilization (again, this doesn’t make sense - when Wuhan actually did come under heavy threat from the virus, social media posts and videos did leak out to us in January).
> Suggesting the virus was circulating in China as early as August but was being covered up?
It's a well established fact that the existence of the virus was initially being covered up and local doctors trying to raise the alarm were being silenced. Even mainland Chinese know this (and are angry with the authorities). One of those doctors was Li Wenliang who has become somewhat of a national hero after his death to covid[1]. Him and dozens of others were given a very stern warning to stop talking about the possibility of a new disease outbreak in the weeks prior to covid becoming official when overwhelming evidence made it no longer possible to sweep under the rug.
The only angle here is that the time when the outbreak began is earlier than thought. This isn't even related to the notion of any coverup. It could have been circulating for months in low volumes without anyone really paying attention. Until the outbreak reaches critical mass, all you'll get is micro clusters which appear and disappear without really blowing up - as we're now seeing in countries that got their first wave under control.
The fact that people here still think that the initial coverup is some sort of conspiracy theory, when it's common knowledge even in China, is a bit mind blowing.
I call this intelligentsia-baiting. Where one needs to educate others parroting insights(/memes) from coastal-elite-marking editorials without reading primary sources.
Li Wenliang was neither a whistleblower nor did he have any first-hand novel data to share. He, an ophthalmologist, received a private group message within the hospital from ER department director and he simply re-shared the message to other private groups with his classmates.
The ER director, Ai Fen, was the source of the hypothesis that some patients in the hospital had, incorrectly, SARS and she was the right channel to escalate in the first place. And her escalation was successful when 1 nurse was observed to have been infected on January 11th.
Li never intended to broadcast anything to the public. What he did privately share was far less detailed than was on the official Wuhan government site [1], the Hubei provincial site [2] and just general mainstream social media [3] from the same date anyway.
That “only angle” is precisely the problem, as the parent commenter explains quite clearly. It makes sense that some doctors could be briefly silenced for a few weeks at the very beginning of a large virus outbreak (but as we saw, even that apparently attempt to silence failed). It doesn’t make sense that a virus with these characteristics could be covered up for many months without even international travel restrictions.
But err, that's exactly what's happened. We now know that China locked down domestic flights originating from Wuhan in Jan 23. While at the same time pressuring various world governments and WHO to continue accepting international flights.
I feel like this needs to be unpacked for a lot of people. There are two pieces:
1: This paper claims that the virus was circulating in micro-clusters earlier than currently believed. It makes no claims as to any coverup.
2: There is clear evidence of an aggressive coverup lasting at least several weeks prior to covid becoming official. This makes no claims as to when the virus started circulating. Only when the authorities became aware of it.
These two statements are unrelated. The root parent post poisoned the well by conflating them. This paper is just another step towards tracking down the origin of the virus, it has nothing to do with coverups - whether real or conspiracy theory.
> We now know that China locked down domestic flights originating from Wuhan in Jan 23. While at the same time pressuring various world governments and WHO to continue accepting international flights.
As someone else pointed out, this is not a “now know”, it was public the same day in January that it happened.
> 1: This paper claims that the virus was circulating in micro-clusters earlier than currently believed. It makes no claims as to any coverup.
If the virus were circulating to the point of significantly increasing hospital visits in September, that means the Chinese doctors were covering up/hiding atypical pneumonia cases for months. (This doesn’t actually make sense because a virus doesn’t stop spreading because of a cover-up of course and would have escaped Wuhan much earlier)
> We now know that China locked down domestic flights originating from Wuhan in Jan 23.
They locked down all flights originating from Wuhan. In fact, they completely shut down the airport.
The incorrect claim that international flights continued was invented by Niall Ferguson of the Hoover Institution, and then spread uncritically by various news media, as detailed in The Independent: https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-independent-1029/20200607...
As far as I can tell, the root parent tried to address the various posts here, but mostly on other (social media) sites that immediately jump to the conclusion that do connect 1 and 2. That this was indeed covered up for months, and that this was all planned by China to hurt the west, and whatnot. I see this a lot. It's like we desperately need to focus on things in other countries that are even worse than all the issues we have here. Too bad that stupid cop killed that black guy, ruined the party and shifted our attention back.
A rational discourse backed by data is way more useful than meaningless comments trying to fan the flames. I'd recommend having another HN thread if you'd really want to have this discussion, and I will happily participate.
The lockdown happened in Jan 20, and it is public. Not 'we now know', it is 'we knew'. What's wrong with "pressuring various world governments and WHO to continue accepting international flights"? Did any country during this crisis prevent their own people from going out except Wuhan China? Did countries stop receiving European and American when there are cases in those countries?
I like how you generalize everything as 'well established fact', 'even mainland Chinese know', 'common knowledge'. And yes, I don't think there are initial coverup, and the world has both underestimated and overestimated the virus. Try to analyze how guardian covers the virus over a time, you will understand how journalism work in a modern age.
Not trying to prove you wrong, but I really don't think anyone has enough facts to claim either way confidently. I don't necessarily agree with all of the data presented, but I think your response to it is emotional and unwarranted—the authors haven't said anything about cover up as far as I can tell.
Also, I think just because it's circulating doesn't necessarily mean that there is a good chance of it being brought to other countries. If it really started off in a wet market, I can imagine that the people who are most susceptible to catching the virus initially are not those who can afford/have the opportunity to travel.
If I'm not mistaken, August is about when people return from summer holiday, and there aren't really holidays until Chinese New Year. There a week of holiday in October for National Day, but people typically travel back to their home town instead of overseas.
It feels possible that the virus could be limited to just transmission within China for a while, which gets spread with every festival between August and late December/January, eventually reaches a critical mass and spread to the rest of the world with people travelling due to Chinese New Year in early 2020.
I honestly don't think I'm right, and you probably spotted logical flaws in the example I have given above. I just want to point out that the problem is extremely complex, and even the facts that you have pointed out are only a small part of the whole picture that just happen to support your views and arguments.
A highly contagious disease like COVID19 simply can’t only spread to people who don’t travel.
The timeline of this disease being spread from August 2019 is incompatible with a lot of what we empirically know about the virus, and should be treated as wrong.
We now know that only a small percentage, maybe single-digit, of infected are responsible for super spreading events. The vast majority infect just one other person. Prof Drosten explained a simplified estimate for this: 1 infects another until the 10th who just by chance infects not 1 but 10.
To expand a little with my basic math skills: There's five, maybe seven days between all those infections and it takes months to snowball into a noticeable epidemic. 10 hops to 10 infections, another 7 to 100 active infections, it probably takes three months just to reach 100, a fourth month for 1000 from which point it should get noticed even in a million people city.
Secondly most people are infections for just a week, those with mild symptoms might be even less: Without coughing, singing or shouting (e.g. sport event) the chances drops even further.
Thirdly: The weather. The warmer it is the more often we open the office window for fresh air, we spend more time outside and are less likely to get into close contact for long enough to spread the virus.
For me August as a start of the local epidemic, even earlier for the initial animal-human transmission sounds very plausible.
The hypothesis of a virus circulating in August which eventually evolved into what is now SARS-CoV-2 is probably likely (and surely more convenient), rather than the alternative hypothesis of a virus suddenly emerging perfectly adapted to humans and human-human transmission close to a laboratory that studies and specialises in such viruses.
Anecdata, an old relative of mine died of pneumonia earlier this year. My relative did not test positive for influenza despite having flu like symptoms for two weeks prior.
The local hospital’s ICU was overwhelmed with patients having the same symptoms. This was in January. COVID was not on the local radar.
But this was in a senior citizen community town, so overwhelmed hospitals aren’t really newsworthy. And I personally only entertain the idea it was COVID-19, but it doesn’t make sense because the dates are all wrong.
Then articles like this make me wonder, what if it swept by undetected? Were the most vulnerable communities already hit and we didn’t notice? Could that happen?
CDC tracks pneumonia deaths across the entire United States through two separate systems.
It couldn’t sweep by undetected. When we actually got hit by coronavirus hard, alarms starting blaring immediately both in local health department stats and in CDC FluView which tracks “influenza-like illnesses” and pneumonia mortality.
1. CDC FluView data - the coronavirus outbreak in the United States is clearly visible as an historically large spike of pneumonia mortality. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm
2. New York city’s own surveillance system “ While only about 100 cases of the coronavirus had been confirmed in the whole state, the city’s surveillance system was, by the end of the first week in March, signaling a spike in influenza-like illnesses at emergency rooms. A few days later, the number of police officers calling out sick jumped noticeably, as did calls to 911 for fever and cough.“ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/nyregion/new-york-coronav...
A group of Athletes from Sweden suspected they did, as several had symptoms after returning. However, they now all tested negative. If they had tested positive now, that would have been big news.
I would also point out that Thailand received 11M Chinese tourists in 2019. It's reasonable to assume that a good chunk of those came in the second half of the year, and hundreds of thousands were plausibly from the Hubei Province. Yet they recorded their first case in January.
There is evidence that there was already community spread in France in November [1]. Note that the article there also mentioned a study that a case (without connection to China) in France was detected in late December. So there is significant evidence that COVID19 was spreading worldwide at least in December.
[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3083599/fran...
Quoting a professor of Computational Systems Biology at University College London about the OP paper, it's:
"most implausible. The analysis of genomic data consistently and robustly points to the ancestor of SARSCoV2 (i.e. the host jump into humans) dating back to around November 2019, see e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S156713482... "
Around november as the earliest month also matches the speed of spread of the virus, which we were able to observe and track all around the world. With that speed, August or September aren't plausible too.
Given the lengthy incubation time, and lack of symptoms in many, it could certainly have taken months to be indistinguishable from any other virus. The first few generations of infected people would likely have been handfuls.
So, assuming all that is true, why did the virus not spread worldwide earlier? That's the crux of what that person you're responding to was taking about. Can you share something from your knowledge of articles, posts, and anecdotes that provides some clarity on that question?
Here's a suggestion and no scientific evidence backing this.
The virus might have spread worldwide earlier. There might have been deaths due to it earlier too. There was no way of knowing it until Jan 2020. No testing. Nothing. Also the fact that this virus affects people with existing conditions, there's a very good chance that initial deaths / patient 0 / index patient might have been tagged as dead under their respective conditions. As far as the symptoms go, there's no 'unique' symptom so that might have led to people saying that their coughing is due to cold or whatever.
It’s not a “unique symptom” of the disease exactly, but health care disasters like we saw later in Lombardy and New York would not have gone unnoticed even if we had no particular virus test.
NYC was putting patients into hospital cafeterias, the Javits Center, and a US navy ship in the harbor if you didn’t notice. Moreover, many people who called in sick were told to stay at home because there wasn’t room in the hospital for them like there normally would have been.
> It was only a month ago when Cuomo and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) suggested that the crisis would blow over. But as the need for more hospital beds became clear, Cuomo, at his daily news briefings, described his forceful push on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and then his calls to President Trump, to allow covid-19 patients at the Javits Center.
I’m not playing semantic games. I consider what happened to be a healthcare disaster, and if you don’t, that’s fine. We’re still talking about the same thing.
I was looking up "coronavirus" on google trends. What I saw was a flat 0 except for a blip in late august, and a score of 100 on September 21, 2019 coming from Hubei Province specifically.
Those results remained the same for over a month until I posted the above in a hacker news comment. Then I was down voted heavily and the results suddenly changed. I do have a picture of it, because I wanted to share the results with my friend and they dont use social media, so I forwarded a picture.
while I agree with the hacker news downvoters (the downvote, hate, hate, unsubscribe, rage, rage, you must be stupid crowd) that this doesn't prove anything, it is certainly part of the evidence building up.
A plausible explanation is that they had seen the term somewhere and wanted to see what means.
Other could be that integrity search databases was compromised somehow and the term was introduced later. I don't know if this is technically feasible or not, but this shouldn't be discarded as a possibility, for sure.
And other is what is claimed here is faked up and really never happened.
Can someone enlighten me: with Google being blocked in China, how the heck does one search the term in Wuhan and had it being recorded by Google? I know people in China can use VPN to search Google, but the recorded IP would be the exit node of the VPN wouldn't it?
It’s the 21st century. There were many direct flights between Wuhan and the United States every day, as well as with other countries. If the virus were circulating in august that would have given it months to spread to the USA. We know from antibody studies and the lack of deaths that didn’t happen - the virus didn’t spread widely until 2020.
Vietnam has a population of 100 million and a land border with China. They activated their pandemic response in January and have had ZERO coronavirus deaths. Taiwan, again, activated their response on December 31, 2019, and has had only 7 deaths from COVID-19. These numbers are impossible to square with the idea that COVID-19 was in wide circulation in the Chinese population in August or September.
Therefore the idea that it was circulating in human-to-human transmission in China as early as 4 months before 2020 just can’t make sense.
This seems like science in service of politics or publicity - it’s already being breathlessly used as proof that China somehow covered up the virus for months as an attack on western civilization (again, this doesn’t make sense - when Wuhan actually did come under heavy threat from the virus, social media posts and videos did leak out to us in January).