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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Can I just add that seasonal influenza varies widely from year to year? [0]
It just so happens that this year was a moderately bad year in the US. I don't know about China. But, they'd have to exclude differences from a bad flu season to have any chance of proving their point rigorously.
I have done more research about the 6 hospitals, my initial claim of "6 small hospitals" is wrong, they at least include the biggest two, Wuhan Union and Tongji.
The claim "far away from the wet market" still holds, these hospitals are not in the Jiangan District, and 5 of them are on the other side of the Yangtze River.
You mean SARS-CoV2, that's the virus. How would they be able to detect it? Would they even know what they were looking for? Would CoV2 trigger the same tests as SARS1 (for non-PCR tests)?
I was traveling in Japan and Taiwan in October of 2019. I came down with a weird flu-like illness that persisted for three or four weeks (much longer than a flu would have normally lasted for me). And it wasn't just that the symptoms persisted. I really felt sick for that long (with fever and sweats). The flu-like thing also came after a week or so of diarrhea. Could have just been GI issues related to traveling but who knows? Ever since it was reported that the pandemic may have begun earlier than had previously been thought, I've been wondering if I didn't in fact get this virus very early on.
I also had a colleague with me who was traveling with his wife. His wife was also very sick with some kind of super-flu like thing. She was saying it was basically the worst flu of her life.
I have a similar anecdote, but tested negative for nCoV antibodies. I figure my human brain is just prone to availability bias. There were and still are lot of viruses out there, and many share similar symptoms.
Some of my friends where making regular trips to central China in the late 90’s and described how anyone joining them got horrifically sick at least once. Though regulars tended to have fewer issues. Presumably, they where in contact with a range of local diseases most of which never spread widely enough to become a pandemic.
It’s surprisingly difficult to track the this stuff in part because many diseases make the jump but then simply die out without gaining a major foothold in the human population.
The flu literally kills people. If it doesn't put someone in the ICU or the ground, i'm not sure "super" flu is the appropriate term. What would normal flu that kills people be called then? It's not diminishing someone's experience to simply say the flu.
Also, I was sick three separate times in the first three months of the year. Very different symptoms each time. There were nasty colds going around.
I heard a handful of first hand accounts of weird, extra-severe flu-like illnesses from coworkers/friends over last 9 months, but what gets me is that mortality anomalies only started in what, late Feb? That's what I can't square away with the anecdotes.
There are more than one major flu strands in the wild now and depending on which we got first will tell us how we react to the other. Or, so I'm told.
Here's a video on the flu from 1918 that killed many. It's a few years old and talks about our responses to virus and how they trace them. It's enlightening.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48Klc3DPdtk
In any case, it could have been a bad flu infection. An antibody test would really help. I know several people who had a bad flu that was detected as influenza.
After visiting my brother in Las Vegas the first week of February I came down with a fever, sweats, and extremely bad cough with wheezing in my chest for over a week. I saw a doctor two weeks in and she thought I had bronchitis and prescribed me an inhaler. The Rx failed to treat the cough or wheezing. I emailed the doctor after over a week and she was surprised the medication wasn't working. It ran it's course for about a month exactly. Now I don't actually think I had COVID-19, but the chance is non-zero for sure. I wish it was cheap/easy to get an antibody test in the U.S. so I won't need to worry as much in the small chance I did actually have it.
I had horrible sickness (was tested for flu, but it wasn't, doctors assumed pneumonia) in end of September, that led to me being part OOO for entire October, after returning from my European vacation. I'm joking to my wife that I'm patient 0 or close: part of the vacation was in Italy (worst hit), then I went to Zurich, then to Seattle (I live close to Kirkland, where first covid cluster started).
p.s. No, it wasn't COVID, at least I recently tested and was said that I don't have it. I haven't asked if I have antibodies though.
I took a domestic flight on Saturday and have had GI issues starting today. I procured a COVID-19 test kit before I flew just in case, and am thinking of administering it tomorrow or the day after. :\
There's also the "mystery respiratory illness" that was never identified in July 2019 which could potentially point to an even earlier start. Does anyone know if they've looked into it being related?
> Three people have also died, but Dr. Benjamin Schwartz of the Fairfax County Health Department said Wednesday afternoon that those who died were "older" and had complex health problems. Officials don't yet know the extent to which the respiratory illness contributed to their deaths, he said.
Its saddening to see the way we are responding to this pandemic. I understand that finding the source of the pandemic is important, however it seems like we are highly politicizing a world wide problem and trying to blame each other for cover ups. If the pandemic started in august and given the rate of transmission we are seeing world wide, we should have had a ridiculous spike in the number of deaths by now. Furthermore, there are many international flights coming out of Wu Han, the rest of the world should have detected the virus earlier then.
The fact is none of us were prepared and we were all too complacent about things. Towards the end of February I made a trip from Singapore to Seattle. At the time the virus was peaking in China. I recall that the flight was extremely empty and already most countries in Asia had begun temperature screening at airports and started conducting quarantines. On the other hand as I walked through the immigration and customs in US there was not even the slightest trace of preparation for the virus. Not once was I asked "did you travel to China?" and for a country with such a large expenditure on defense I cannot see how much it would cost to place thermal cameras at the customs exit.
In all honesty I would love to see a study done on how this virus came to be but this study should be conducted on a purely scientific stand point. In fact it'd be best if we took politics out of the picture and ask
- what was the chain of transmission from its original animal source?
- what type of mutations took place?
- how in future can we come up with a robust international/interspecies virus surveillance program such that we can flag animal viruses which are likely to mutate to infect humans?
As of now all I can see is that both US and China are misbehaving and taking shots at one another. Our global supply chains have come to a halt. There are countries like US and India which overproduced food yet out of fear of lack of food these countries have halted export causing problems for other countries dependent on them for food. Yet, farmers in these countries are having to throw away crop because they cant sell there produce domestically. As a human race can we really stoop any lower?
> While queries of the respiratory symptom “cough” show seasonal fluctuations coinciding with yearly influenza seasons, “diarrhea” is a more COVID-19 specific symptom and only shows an association with the current epidemic.
Since when is diarrhea a COVID-19 specific symptom? Using Baye's the probability of Covid-19 given diarrhea is:
prevalence of covid in general pop (medium low) * probability of diarrhea given Covid-19 (very low, given we only recently found out this was a symptom at all) / prevalence of diarrhea in general pop (the prevalence of diarrhea in general is definitely higher than Covid-19).
Which lends to a very small probability. Pre-print publications like this based off of shaky data should be taken with a large handful of salt.
This is very interesting but the date significantly precedes my (layman's!) understanding of TMRCA estimations of mid November (earliest cases examining the existing genetic evidence and extrapolating backwards through genetic drift calculations).
How do the scientists here account for the disagreement - beyond the fact they are using completely different methods?
Alternatively, I'd be interested in somebody explaining why my understanding of the TMRCA is incorrect - like I said, its not my field.
Regarding the year-over-year comparison of cars in parking lots, have these researchers considered that perhaps car ownership is just growing that fast[1] in China?
A highly contagious disease would hardly be not noticed during a time of free travel.
You could also do the reverse math knowing what we know about its R-naught.
This paper is a trainwreck. Could be a case of scientific fraud.
Gist of this paper:
The authors look for circumstantial evidence of community transmission of COVID-19 within Wuhan for dates substantially prior to the seafood market outbreak. They do this by attempting to triangulate* web search volume data with satellite mapping of Wuhan hospital parking lots.
*suggestively gesture back and forth between
In the parking lots, they're looking for more vehicles than expected based on prior years' imagery.
In the web search trends, they're looking for "disease signals".
Specifically, they're looking at two terms: a symptom of sufficient specificity to be useful for differential diagnosis of COVID-19 vs. influenza ("diarrhea"), and a more generic term representing influenza-like illness ("cough").
Here's the teardown:
1. "We developed a comprehensive list of hospitals in Wuhan (using Google Maps, Wikipedia and PubMed)."
List not provided.
2. Search terms are given in English even though they were actually input in Mandarin.
You can verify this by trying to search the English terms yourself. By process of elimination and the shape of their graphs, the terms had to have been:
"cough" → 咳嗽
"diarrhea" → 腹泻
Live link below. Requires signup. Make sure to select Hubei → Wuhan (湖北 → 武汉).
Maxima: It shouldn't go to 600. The actual values peak on Baidu at 711.
Minima: None of their data should be plotting near 0. The minimum volume in their date range is 76.
6. The uptick for "diarrhea" (腹泻) that they claim exists doesn't.
Again, this is Figure 2b. The red line is the problem here.
This appears to be deliberate fabrication. No competent researcher can miss the discrepancy between what this graph depicts and what the source depicts.
咳嗽 ("cough" / blue line on harvard preprint) was following a completely normal-looking seasonal cycle during the period under discussion.
腹泻 ("diarrhea" / red line on harvard preprint) was, again, following a completely normal-looking seasonal cycle, with a slightly elevated baseline.
The red line is mis-plotted to trend up in a sudden surge right where the researchers would need this to occur for their argument to hold any value at all. Then, rather than declining substantially prior to the January 2020 cluster, this plot depicts the trend holding through to 2020.
This information is simply false. That's not what Baidu reports.
If you can't be trusted to screenshot a graph without us having to arrive at this point, there's no point even assessing the content of your claims about something orders of magnitude more complex.
The sat mapping doesn't constitute evidence so much as it constitutes having paid for the visuals needed to launder this preprint into mainstream news. The only thing that can currently be done with this information is a data dump for other researchers to use.
8. Proofread your paper. 2019 → 2020 below:
> Both search query terms show a large increase approximately 3 weeks preceding the large spike of confirmed COVID-19 cases in early 2019 (Figure 2, c, purple). There is a large decrease in hospital volume and search query data following the public health lockdown of Wuhan on January 23, 2019 (Figure 2, third annotation).
9. No stats anywhere.
Can't do time series analysis without math. Spinning a yarn / telling a just-so story shouldn't be the level of reporting expected of academics in this context.
10. No attempt to build a keyword list or other reference information of continuing utility.
So the analysis dies with this one paper, essentially. There's nowhere to go from here.
I saw this on the national evening news today, and was flabbergasted at its insinuation.
The immediate thing that baffled me was why they thought, a year-over-year count of cars in a hospital parking lot, was an indication of an early coronavirus outbreaks, which again, China was concealing from the world.
The news report only said they analyzed 1 year. Did they do it over several months? Or did they do it over 60 months, which might be a better sampling over time. Who knows. But that evidence is rather circumstantial.
Did they also consider that Wuhan doesn’t have as many local clinics, so when someone gets sick, they all go to the same central hospitals, for everything. This is also what added to the problems in Wuhan with the initial outbreak.
Then, regarding the increases in search queries for diarrhea and cough, two symptoms of the virus. But I’m sure searches for coughs go up annually during flu season anyways. I don’t think internet searches from random people over the internet, is a very good signal for anything, and may just be adding noise to the data anyways.
I caught a flu on Dec 23rd. Tested negative for A/B. Continued to have it. Went back in January still with the flu. Tested negative again for A/B and still had effects from it past Jan 20th.
I felt like I was dying and my lungs were full of really bad stuff.
Around the time I would have showed antibodies you could not get a test in the US.
Needless to say, I believe the virus was around before it had been noticed.
That time frame of late Dec is normal flu season. Many people could have been walking around with covid and no one would have noticed.
There was a sizeable group of folks visiting from Wuhan in CES. Several folks I know fell ill after the event. I've been trying to figure out if CES magnified it, but there is very little information available on this.
Sorry but the methodology just sounds laughably stupid on its face. It would baffle me if this kind of analysis would meet the bar to identify any kind of epidemic, let alone a novel and possibly evolving virus.
Not to accuse the authors of anything, but I think the level of bias and wishful thinking in some public and political realm, when it comes to the origin of this virus, is bordering on hysteria. Does anyone still remember the evidence that Trump and Pompeo were seeing about the lab leak theory? Why is there no update coming from any "intelligence" source?
I think the fact of the matter is, the origin question won't be scientifically and satisfactorily answered until at least a few years from now, and only with teams of international scientists. In any case, it would be impossible to achieve that in such a politically charged environment.
Without being emotional and having any sources to back me up, I just believe this virus has been around for a little bit longer than we have initial been told. It seems reasonable taking into consideration that a lot of countries has had a slow infection curve.
But no matter how you spin this, IMO, the chineese is the source of this mess. And frankly it doesn't matter when it happened. It happened.
The key is to have open data and not let Chinese to have world data whilst they close theirs for themselves or not used it for fear of political consequences. Close an area and let china choose to do it or not is not the human right answer. You need to force them to join the world in a meaningful way. We cannot study photos or things like that like study Soviet Union politics.
Seems like virus activity is going on all the time even without Coronavirus. Did the data indicate that virus activity in Fall 2019 was in excess of what would be expected from observing other years?
This seems like low-value data that doesn't mean anything by itself.
[+] [-] javagram|5 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] missosoup|5 years ago|reply
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/20/chinese-inquir...
[+] [-] hmwhy|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] TomK32|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] krona|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fingerlocks|5 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] legulere|5 years ago|reply
There were cases in France in December without connection to China: https://www.google.de/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-europ... and suspected cases in November: https://www.google.de/amp/s/amp.rfi.fr/en/france/20200520-sc...
[+] [-] blago|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cycomanic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acqq|5 years ago|reply
"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... "
(The quote is from here:
https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/12702949067880980... )
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.
[+] [-] bbarn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Knuthtruth|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] autokad|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zachguo|5 years ago|reply
- only 6 small hospitals were included, and far away from the wet market
- Baidu Search Index doesn't match what they claim https://imgur.com/a/UkcUZou
- No test for statistical significance, really?
COVID-like mysterious pneumonia was not that hard to detect, the hospital would be alerted once doctors and nurses got infected.
[+] [-] joshgel|5 years ago|reply
It just so happens that this year was a moderately bad year in the US. I don't know about China. But, they'd have to exclude differences from a bad flu season to have any chance of proving their point rigorously.
It's a very cool analysis though.
0. https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/hcp/weekly-sur...
(sorry for the PDF)
[+] [-] zachguo|5 years ago|reply
The claim "far away from the wet market" still holds, these hospitals are not in the Jiangan District, and 5 of them are on the other side of the Yangtze River.
[+] [-] djsumdog|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davesque|5 years ago|reply
I was traveling in Japan and Taiwan in October of 2019. I came down with a weird flu-like illness that persisted for three or four weeks (much longer than a flu would have normally lasted for me). And it wasn't just that the symptoms persisted. I really felt sick for that long (with fever and sweats). The flu-like thing also came after a week or so of diarrhea. Could have just been GI issues related to traveling but who knows? Ever since it was reported that the pandemic may have begun earlier than had previously been thought, I've been wondering if I didn't in fact get this virus very early on.
I also had a colleague with me who was traveling with his wife. His wife was also very sick with some kind of super-flu like thing. She was saying it was basically the worst flu of her life.
[+] [-] kube-system|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retric|5 years ago|reply
Some of my friends where making regular trips to central China in the late 90’s and described how anyone joining them got horrifically sick at least once. Though regulars tended to have fewer issues. Presumably, they where in contact with a range of local diseases most of which never spread widely enough to become a pandemic.
It’s surprisingly difficult to track the this stuff in part because many diseases make the jump but then simply die out without gaining a major foothold in the human population.
[+] [-] codezero|5 years ago|reply
Everyone I've heard with such an anecdote has received multiple negative antibody tests, anecdata! (Only two people I've known)
[+] [-] koheripbal|5 years ago|reply
Maybe it was covid... but it just doesn't tell us anything since there's obviously a reporting bias here.
[+] [-] icedistilled|5 years ago|reply
Also, I was sick three separate times in the first three months of the year. Very different symptoms each time. There were nasty colds going around.
[+] [-] foobarian|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mfer|5 years ago|reply
Here's a video on the flu from 1918 that killed many. It's a few years old and talks about our responses to virus and how they trace them. It's enlightening.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48Klc3DPdtk
In any case, it could have been a bad flu infection. An antibody test would really help. I know several people who had a bad flu that was detected as influenza.
[+] [-] bradly|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] galkk|5 years ago|reply
p.s. No, it wasn't COVID, at least I recently tested and was said that I don't have it. I haven't asked if I have antibodies though.
[+] [-] herval|5 years ago|reply
I know at least half a dozen people who have the exact same theory - a couple got tested and it came out negative
[+] [-] jondwillis|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheSpiceIsLife|5 years ago|reply
It makes sense because the thing they’re getting in to is mucous membranes, which the GI is lined with.
[+] [-] jsf01|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bamboozled|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] y-c-o-m-b|5 years ago|reply
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/health-officials-to...
> Three people have also died, but Dr. Benjamin Schwartz of the Fairfax County Health Department said Wednesday afternoon that those who died were "older" and had complex health problems. Officials don't yet know the extent to which the respiratory illness contributed to their deaths, he said.
[+] [-] accurrent|5 years ago|reply
In all honesty I would love to see a study done on how this virus came to be but this study should be conducted on a purely scientific stand point. In fact it'd be best if we took politics out of the picture and ask
- what was the chain of transmission from its original animal source?
- what type of mutations took place?
- how in future can we come up with a robust international/interspecies virus surveillance program such that we can flag animal viruses which are likely to mutate to infect humans?
As of now all I can see is that both US and China are misbehaving and taking shots at one another. Our global supply chains have come to a halt. There are countries like US and India which overproduced food yet out of fear of lack of food these countries have halted export causing problems for other countries dependent on them for food. Yet, farmers in these countries are having to throw away crop because they cant sell there produce domestically. As a human race can we really stoop any lower?
[+] [-] knolax|5 years ago|reply
Since when is diarrhea a COVID-19 specific symptom? Using Baye's the probability of Covid-19 given diarrhea is:
prevalence of covid in general pop (medium low) * probability of diarrhea given Covid-19 (very low, given we only recently found out this was a symptom at all) / prevalence of diarrhea in general pop (the prevalence of diarrhea in general is definitely higher than Covid-19).
Which lends to a very small probability. Pre-print publications like this based off of shaky data should be taken with a large handful of salt.
[+] [-] mellosouls|5 years ago|reply
How do the scientists here account for the disagreement - beyond the fact they are using completely different methods?
Alternatively, I'd be interested in somebody explaining why my understanding of the TMRCA is incorrect - like I said, its not my field.
[+] [-] hbarka|5 years ago|reply
A highly contagious disease would hardly be not noticed during a time of free travel. You could also do the reverse math knowing what we know about its R-naught.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311910366_Cities_of...
[+] [-] ceedan|5 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23074528
China reports infectious disease counts and deaths each month. The numbers from December '19 were insane compared to '18
[+] [-] xorfish|5 years ago|reply
There doesn't seem to be any real evidence for this theory in the genetic data we have.
[+] [-] jcahill|5 years ago|reply
Gist of this paper:
The authors look for circumstantial evidence of community transmission of COVID-19 within Wuhan for dates substantially prior to the seafood market outbreak. They do this by attempting to triangulate* web search volume data with satellite mapping of Wuhan hospital parking lots.
*suggestively gesture back and forth between
In the parking lots, they're looking for more vehicles than expected based on prior years' imagery.
In the web search trends, they're looking for "disease signals".
Specifically, they're looking at two terms: a symptom of sufficient specificity to be useful for differential diagnosis of COVID-19 vs. influenza ("diarrhea"), and a more generic term representing influenza-like illness ("cough").
Here's the teardown:
1. "We developed a comprehensive list of hospitals in Wuhan (using Google Maps, Wikipedia and PubMed)."
List not provided.
2. Search terms are given in English even though they were actually input in Mandarin.
You can verify this by trying to search the English terms yourself. By process of elimination and the shape of their graphs, the terms had to have been:
"cough" → 咳嗽
"diarrhea" → 腹泻
Live link below. Requires signup. Make sure to select Hubei → Wuhan (湖北 → 武汉).
http://index.baidu.com/v2/main/index.html#/trend/咳嗽?words=咳嗽...
3. "We extracted the relative search volumes of the terms “cough” and “diarrhea” using WebPlotDigitizer, v4.215."
What? The values are provided on tooltip hover. This data is written into the page. You can just pull the real data out of the html.
Based on a cursory glance at WebPlotDigitizer, the vague method quote above appears to be tantamount to saying "we made up the data from screenshots".
4. They're looking at seasonal trends.
This is clearly visible from basic inspection. This is not interesting.
5. Their Relative Search Volume scale doesn't agree with Baidu.
Their numbers are wrong. Just look at Figure 2b's y-axis.
https://files.catbox.moe/v05oss.png
Maxima: It shouldn't go to 600. The actual values peak on Baidu at 711.
Minima: None of their data should be plotting near 0. The minimum volume in their date range is 76.
6. The uptick for "diarrhea" (腹泻) that they claim exists doesn't.
Again, this is Figure 2b. The red line is the problem here.
This appears to be deliberate fabrication. No competent researcher can miss the discrepancy between what this graph depicts and what the source depicts.
咳嗽 ("cough" / blue line on harvard preprint) was following a completely normal-looking seasonal cycle during the period under discussion.
腹泻 ("diarrhea" / red line on harvard preprint) was, again, following a completely normal-looking seasonal cycle, with a slightly elevated baseline.
The red line is mis-plotted to trend up in a sudden surge right where the researchers would need this to occur for their argument to hold any value at all. Then, rather than declining substantially prior to the January 2020 cluster, this plot depicts the trend holding through to 2020.
This information is simply false. That's not what Baidu reports.
Here's a side-by-side of the discrepancy:
https://files.catbox.moe/5s6i7o.png
Here's a superimposed version, for charitable reading of Figure 2b. I've stretched it to fit. Red should overlay green.
https://files.catbox.moe/eubuci.png
7. Screw the sat mapping, frankly.
If you can't be trusted to screenshot a graph without us having to arrive at this point, there's no point even assessing the content of your claims about something orders of magnitude more complex.
The sat mapping doesn't constitute evidence so much as it constitutes having paid for the visuals needed to launder this preprint into mainstream news. The only thing that can currently be done with this information is a data dump for other researchers to use.
8. Proofread your paper. 2019 → 2020 below:
> Both search query terms show a large increase approximately 3 weeks preceding the large spike of confirmed COVID-19 cases in early 2019 (Figure 2, c, purple). There is a large decrease in hospital volume and search query data following the public health lockdown of Wuhan on January 23, 2019 (Figure 2, third annotation).
9. No stats anywhere.
Can't do time series analysis without math. Spinning a yarn / telling a just-so story shouldn't be the level of reporting expected of academics in this context.
10. No attempt to build a keyword list or other reference information of continuing utility.
So the analysis dies with this one paper, essentially. There's nowhere to go from here.
[+] [-] blackrock|5 years ago|reply
The immediate thing that baffled me was why they thought, a year-over-year count of cars in a hospital parking lot, was an indication of an early coronavirus outbreaks, which again, China was concealing from the world.
The news report only said they analyzed 1 year. Did they do it over several months? Or did they do it over 60 months, which might be a better sampling over time. Who knows. But that evidence is rather circumstantial.
Did they also consider that Wuhan doesn’t have as many local clinics, so when someone gets sick, they all go to the same central hospitals, for everything. This is also what added to the problems in Wuhan with the initial outbreak.
Then, regarding the increases in search queries for diarrhea and cough, two symptoms of the virus. But I’m sure searches for coughs go up annually during flu season anyways. I don’t think internet searches from random people over the internet, is a very good signal for anything, and may just be adding noise to the data anyways.
[+] [-] lolc|5 years ago|reply
Looks like a fishing expedition to me.
[+] [-] brianbreslin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonetheman|5 years ago|reply
I felt like I was dying and my lungs were full of really bad stuff.
Around the time I would have showed antibodies you could not get a test in the US.
Needless to say, I believe the virus was around before it had been noticed.
That time frame of late Dec is normal flu season. Many people could have been walking around with covid and no one would have noticed.
[+] [-] sriram_sun|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yurlungur|5 years ago|reply
Not to accuse the authors of anything, but I think the level of bias and wishful thinking in some public and political realm, when it comes to the origin of this virus, is bordering on hysteria. Does anyone still remember the evidence that Trump and Pompeo were seeing about the lab leak theory? Why is there no update coming from any "intelligence" source?
I think the fact of the matter is, the origin question won't be scientifically and satisfactorily answered until at least a few years from now, and only with teams of international scientists. In any case, it would be impossible to achieve that in such a politically charged environment.
[+] [-] danielovichdk|5 years ago|reply
But no matter how you spin this, IMO, the chineese is the source of this mess. And frankly it doesn't matter when it happened. It happened.
[+] [-] ngcc_hk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RIMR|5 years ago|reply
This seems like low-value data that doesn't mean anything by itself.