niph [she/her]

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • I take your point that nothing in the paper provides compelling evidence for the origin being from the US, but you originally said there was no reason to believe it didn’t cross over to humans in Southern China, based on circumstantial speculation.

    The evidence does make a case for there being a) no COVID in Wuhan prior to Dec 2019 and b) the circulation of COVID in the US around Dec 2019. The position is therefore that COVID was contemporaneously in the US and China, which substantially weakens the case for a Chinese human crossover.

    As for your assertion that China is home to larger populations of the kinds of animals that carry coronavirus, the document also presents negative testing results in bats and deer of the region as part of the origin tracing research.

    In any case the authors of the paper don’t actually assert that it came from the US, but rightly point out that China has co-operated with the WHO in allowing and carrying out studies to trace the origins while the US has refused to even entertain the idea.