cinnaa42 [none/use name]

india and pakistan are really going for it huh

deleted by creator

The position is therefore that COVID was contemporaneously in the US and China, which substantially weakens the case for a Chinese human crossover.

This would be true if major outbreaks occurred in the US and China at the same point after December 2019. But they didn’t - Wuhan experienced an outbreak around 4 months before the first large US cities were similarly badly hit. Given that Wuhan is one of the largest cities in central/southern China and a key transit hub for the whole country, it makes sense that it would be the first urban area that the virus reached and exploded in, thus finally getting noticed following a period of low-level transmission in the surrounding rural areas. If the virus emerged in the US in late 2019 you’d expect New York or some other city to get hit like Wuhan did around when Wuhan did, rather than getting hit around when the rest of the planet besides China did.

Here is a paper from Nature last year which models coronaviruses in bat populations in Southern China based on data taken from bats in that region and proposes a

Here is a paper from 2018 discussing the discovery of viruses similar to MERS in bat populations in the region.

As I said, SARS popped up in the same region in the early 2000s because these viruses are endemic to bat populations in Southern China and recent urbanisation is a driver of crossover events. There isn’t a comparable animal reservoir that we’re aware of within the US, and genomic studies of the virus strongly suggest that it’s unlikely to have leaked from a lab.

why not list the actual references?

bc it’s a politically-motivated press release and not a serious research document, and it’s not written by anyone with the academic integrity to cite sources properly

the other comments here indicate that there’s still an audience for this crap

Yes but you make yourself look obviously biased and uncritical if you assume that literally everything put out by a non-western governmental source is accurate

it absolutely does not, it gives some reasons to believe covid wasn’t in Wuhan specifically before December 2019, and some reasons to believe that covid was spreading in the US in late December 2019. The claims made are entirely compatible with the well-established understanding that covid was circulating in southern China at very low levels in late 2019 and its first major outbreak was in Wuhan, resulting from a super-spreader event at a seafood market in December, and that it was also beginning to spread internationally by the end of December.

The document doesn’t give any particularly strong evidence or point to any study indicating that covid-19 likely originated in the US. Here is a scientific paper which provides strong genomic evidence against the lab origin hypothesis, and in favour of recent zoonotic crossover from bats. Nothing in what it states is incompatible with the idea that the virus crossed over to humans somewhere in southern China (but not Wuhan, which was the first major outbreak within China) in late 2019. Some of the key points the doc makes:

• Covid-19 does not appear to have been circulating in Wuhan prior to December 2019 when a super-spreader event occurred at the Huanan seafood market

• Covid-19 was clearly circulating within the US by January 2020 and these outbreaks likely occured in December 2019

• There was a flu outbreak in South Carolina in September 2019

• There were some other minor respiratory outbreaks in the US in late 2019, some of which weren’t respiratory viruses we already knew of (which is typical for respiratory viruses, as there are uncountably many)

• The CDC director stated that some covid-19 deaths were mislabelled as flu deaths early in the outbreak

One particular extract:

From May to October 2019, Virginia reported 19 respiratory disease outbreaks, a significant increase from the 13 and 15 outbreaks recorded during the same period in the previous two years. Laboratory tests were unable to identify the causes of some cases. In July 2019, two communities in northern Virginia reported outbreaks of pneumonia with unknown causes, which local media suspected to be “a mystery virus”.

The level of “argument” being given here is that there were 35% more respiratory disease outbreaks in Virginia compared to the average of the prior two years in late 2019, and the reader is supposed to infer that some of those were covid-19, though the author(s) of this document don’t outright state that, because it’s plainly flawed reasoning and would be too embarrassing to make such a claim. There’s a very obvious political motivation behind the lines of “reasoning” advanced in the latter part of this document, it’s clearly written to with the aim of substantiating a politically convenient argument rather than interrogating that argument fairly.

totally understand why they’re throwing accusations back at the US given the lab leak conspiracism, but there’s no good reason to doubt that the virus crossed over to humans somewhere in southern China given that China is a) a rapidly urbanising country in which the potential for crossover events is significantly greater than in an already-urbanised country like the US, and b) is already known (and has been for decades) to have large natural populations of animals that carry the kind of coronavirus that SARS-COV-2 is. There’s a reason that the first SARS also showed up in this region.

it’s not China’s fault, and they did essentially the best job of any govt on earth at handling the contagion given the scale of the outbreak they were suddenly faced with, but we don’t need to get dragged into shit flinging and start throwing ludicrous accusations to match the enemy’s ludicrous accusations. Better to focus on the facts: China was open about the virus from the get-go, sharing as much information as they could, rapidly carrying out research and giving the world the warning through the established channels; other states such as the US failed to heed that warning and co-operate.

Pakistani artillery has responded according to the BBC

Trump says the US will stop bombing Yemen, israeli govt apparently surprised

The US president says the Houthis have told his administration they no longer want to “fight” and they would halt attacks on Red Sea shipping lanes.

“The Houthis have announced that they don’t want to fight any more,” Trump told reporters at the White House alongside Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.

“They just don’t want to fight. And we will honour that, and we will – we will stop the bombings, and they have capitulated, but more importantly, we will take their word. They say they will not be blowing up ships any more,” he said.

“We just found out about that. So I think that’s very, very positive. … I will accept their word, and we are going to stop the bombing of the booties, effective immediately,” he said.

The Houthis have not confirmed the pause. The US has been striking the Houthis on a near daily basis.

i had a port of this on my nintendo DS when i was young and played through the campaign up until a bugged map which i couldn’t beat :(