Sorry to hear about your friend. What was he hospitalized for? Several hundred thousand dollars is an exorbitant amount of money even with how high the cost of healthcare is in the US.
From a mutual friend, apparently the withdrawals were severe. He was actually admitted to a recovery place with his mom's help (that was $45k for a month!). Fentanyl is stored in fat cells apparently. It takes a long time to leave the system. So he was hospitalized because his potassium levels dropped to a dangerous place.
I'm not sure of the price tag. But i had another friend who was told to go to another hospital when his wife's pregnancy took a bad turn. They spent two weeks and it was several hundred thousand. The insurance said, just beg the hospital to reduce it? It was ridiculous. I'm just sure my friend won't leave with that covered. Not the hospitals responsibility for sure but it's outrageous the cost and prevents people from seeking help.
The lab leak hypothesis makes the most sense. The lab in Wuhan which researches coronaviruses conducts experiences on animals, including bats. Like other labs, there are dedicated personnel for hydrating and feeding the experimental animals. Notably, there are "wet markets" in Wuhan where live animals are sold, including bats, which harbor coronaviruses. Someone who is working in the facility in charge of maintenance of experimental animals has a choice of either sacrificing the animals as per protocol, or selling them to a wet market to make extra money. The most likely scenario was that someone sold the animal, most likely a bat, to a wet market, which happened to contain a virulent coronavirus strain that then infected humans.
Did I just read this correctly? “janitor steals a highly modified and virulent bat and sells it for $10 in a wet market”
Why reach so hard to link this to a Wuhan wet market vs a generic leak? They didn’t sell bats at the market as far as I have read, and what’s the difference? Lab leak is a lab leak.
Indeed, you don't need such a complicated theory. 3 doctors researching a coronavirus end up in a regional hospital, but before they get ID'd with a virus they interact with others in the local community helping it quietly spread among people with stronger immune systems.
It's a 45min drive between the Hunan market <> WIV building:
Not necessarily. If you look at the nature of superspreading events, it's quite often confined to a single site as opposed to infecting people they meet as they travel. In addition, most of the transmission comes from a minority of infected people, look up "overdispersion".
I don't understand the mental gymnastics to discredit the lab leak hypothesis. The fact that the lab and epicenter of the virus are in the same geographic area make it the likely scenario and warrants the most investigation. The efforts to look past this seem artificial.
A big problem was that Trump was into this theory early on: the Chinese virus, from Wuhan. Let's time travel back to May of 2020 for example: "Trump claims to have evidence coronavirus started in Chinese lab but offers no details" [1].
According to the Swamp, Trump cannot be right about anything ever, therefore the virus' origin is unknown and don't call it the Chinese flu because that's racist - even if the early Chinese accounts of the disease literally called it the "Wuhan pneumonia". This became Woke dogma the minute Trump said the opposite.
This whole thing has been disgusting and if we were a serious society thousands in leadership positions would have been fired or resigned in disgrace. Instead, Hollywood made fan films about people who quite easily fit the definition of having committed crimes against humanity, Tedros still has a job, and the WHO won't see any reform - it will see a major expansion of its power. I fear for the next pandemic, because if it's anything deadlier than COVID it might legitimately end civilization given the amount of incompetence we've now entrenched into our civilizational safeguards.
I think this is the problem. Many are claiming a lab leak is the most likely / probable simply because of the proximity of the lab. We should investigate absolutely, but just saying the lab is there so a leak is the most likely doesn’t make sense.
> I don't understand the mental gymnastics to discredit the lab leak hypothesis.
I’m not sure I beleive in Dead Internet Theory so much as I believe in some form of unknowing indoctrination theory.
That if you take the people with these hardline defensive of authority opinions away from the internet for a bit, explain a new event to them, when they get back on the internet, none of the people they normally deal with have the same opinion of what they learned about “offline” at first.
I think we unintentionally have created a mind control device.
You don't need to "discredit" the hypothesis very much, because it shouldn't have any real "credit" to begin with. The only evidence for it at all seems to be the proximity of the Wuhan lab to the first known outbreak, plus the fact that 3 researchers got sick in November (i.e. flu season) with some unknown virus. If you ask me, that plus $5 might buy you a cup of coffee.
it's a hell of coincidence that out of all chinese cities the outbreak started in the one city housing the premiere institute dedicated to researching coronaviruses... so there is no smoking gun evidence, but it's a reasonable hypothesis... anyway, no one apart from the chinese ministry of state security will ever know for sure one way or another
This is definitely the most sensible explanation, since it's quite well known that Wuhan is the most important transportation hub in China since even before the lab was a distant dream in some postdoc's imagination.
And China does have the world's largest annual human migration, in the Spring Festival.
If I was in the planning department at whichever ministry that made the final decision on placement, putting the most prestigious and well funded lab studying dangerous human transmissible viruses at the world's most likely place to originate such a virus is an obvious choice.
i.e. during a few weeks every year Wuhan could easily be 10x more likely to be ground zero then any other city ever.
So you discredit an incredibly likely theory that a rapidly spreading epidemic from an origin city in a totalitarian state with a highly specific lab focusing on coronaviruses, based on lack of credit?
It's called "lack of available evidence." You can't use the fact that there isn't evidence of a thing happening in order to give the theory weight. When the evidence comes out, if it exists, and if it ever does come out for general consumption, then my opinion is subject to change.
Why not just say it came from North Korea? There's just about as much publicly available evidence for that as there is that it came from a lab leak in China.
> You can't use the fact that there isn't evidence of a thing happening in order to give the theory weight
I can and I will, because of the fact that there is some evidence that the Chinese Government made efforts to hide evidence around Covid 19’s origins and their history regarding uncomfortable truths.
You can not argue in good faith on grounds of evidence or no evidence if not all parties are playing open and fair. A totalitarian Government with an overarching system of controlling it‘s population and information is certainly not supporting good scientific research and discovery.
> it’s unreasonable to assume it’s all because a freak mutation with some bats.
I don't think this holds. Such freak mutations happen all the time.
Note that this doesn't discredit lab leak either. It's entirely possible they were testing a new, entirely natural strain they found in some weird cave somewhere. And because that lab had terrible safety protocols (which has been documented extensively), possibly some got out.
It's not really possible to rule out or confirm the lab leak hypothesis without inside information that we are unlikely to ever get. Other than as vague "intelligence report says this", which you can hardly trust.
Your claims:
- The true origin of COVID-19 is known and being kept a secret [citation needed]
- It’s unreasonable to assume a pandemic can be caused by a natural occurring genetic mutation [citation needed]
- Global knowledge that the virus came from a Chinese lab (accidentally? intentionally?) would cause a world war [citation needed]
75% of all new infectious diseases come from animals. How many of those do we have start to finish routes from animals to humans? And if we don't have that route, how many of those are we suspecting of being lab leaks?
If they wrote in their conclusion that it was "low confidence" I think they have good reason for saying that.
> 75% of all new infectious diseases come from animals. How many of those do we have start to finish routes from animals to humans? And if we don't have that route, how many of those are we suspecting of being lab leaks?
None, as far as I know. Nor should it be particularly surprising that no animal origin for COVID-19 has yet been found. The animal origin for SARS was only discovered in 2017: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9 The first outbreak was in 2002. We're less than 4 years away from the first known outbreak of COVID-19, so dismissing a wild animal origin at this point is extremely premature at best.
> On each visit, vendors were asked what species they had sold over the preceding month and in what numbers, along with the prices (US$1:RMB¥6.759) and origin of these goods (wild caught or captive bred/ farmed).
It might be true that no bats were sold in Wuhan wet markets, but this methodology doesn't seem the slightest bit credible.
Imagine if you were selling bats (is that legal in China?) from a likely illegal source (probably illegal in China?). Would you give honest information about the animals you were selling, particularly knowing how criminals can be treated in China?
You might as well ask suspected drug dealers how much crack they're selling in schools: you'll get the same quality of answer.
I am not a lawyer from China and I doubt many posters here are either.
When you have imperfect information, trying to understand a complicated world can never be perfect, but we all still do that anyway because we have to. There's no other way to reason about the world because we're always going to have imperfect information about so many topics.
But I can use my limited knowledge of China, and a reasonable understanding of human nature, to understand that the polling methodology seems unlikely to yield trustworthy results.
Until proven otherwise, I think it is a perfectly reasonable to think that people in China who might deal in some quasi-legal trades wouldn't be perfectly honest in a poll due to concerns about what might happen to them if they admit to something that might be seen as illegal.
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our request to stop. You can't abuse HN like this, regardless of how stupid someone else's theory is or you feel it is.
Release a plague you can’t control through the wet market next to your virology lab, knowing that it will spread among your own people and those of your allies first, and then also probably circle back, hoping that it will be worse for the other guys, sure (somehow) that the war that you started out of nowhere is to your own net benefit.
I doubt it. It was almost immediately clear that the world’s reliance on China for some things was a problem. I think this was a pretty clear outcome, because before COVID there were people already harping on that single point of failure.
This is going to hurt China’s long term influence. Countries are diversifying their strategic supply chains, on shoring capacity for thinks like chip fabs. This weakens China’s geopolitical clout because they won’t be able to control the bottleneck.
Note:
Wuhan was closed to interprovincial traffic very early on. The International Airport, however, was left open.
There's a hanful of ways you can look at that:
Wuhan International couldn't be closed without consent from Beijing.
Beijing didn't grant it because
A) Poor information propagation
Or
B) Someone made a weighty geopolitical decision that in order to best serve China's interests, it was time to make this everyone's problem, leaving the International Airport open as a result.
Or
C) some combo of the two.
I don't know your particular balance in regards to the actual Overton Window as extended to humanity as a whole, but I damn well know where it registers on mine.
Every country understands the concept of Quarantine. There would not have been even a blink of an eye within diplomatic channels. At least I don't think so. It also doesn't jibe with the tight lipped behavior of the Chinese Government, and the iron fist they dropped on their academic establishment that under no circumstances were virological materials to be widely published without Party approval.
The clamp down on information exchange does not strike me as the actions of a group with everyone else's best interests in mind. And given that we have hitherto been pretty chill with China on the whole, I really think if they had gone "screw it, international travel lockdown"; you'd have seen materials and humanitarian relief being flown in in order to help out with citizens stranded overseas. We may not even be having this conversation, because to be frank, how China did decide to react just doesn't make any sense except in the context of someone with something to hide.
In my opinion, the simplest explanation of this is: a worker at the Wuhan facility was accidentally infected (mistakes happen) and it was able to spread. It was not intentional.
An intentional leak would be an attack. I don’t recall that being on the table during the early part of the pandemic. I’m sure there was a least one person suggesting it but I recall the lab leak theory being the most ridiculed was some kind of accident or mistake at the lab resulting in an infected worker. …probably asymptomatic to boot.
It’s so fascinating to me to see someone formulate a hypothesis based on nothing “I think they did[purposely leak a global pandemic-causing virus]”, and then immediately turn around and relish in China’s failure at the thing you claimed they did. Like, do I do this too, and I’m just not aware of it?
I can see Obsidian being popular because it makes notetaking fun and customizable and may motivate people to do it more. But as far as actual productivity goes I can't see any benefit it adds.
When I think of productivity in this context, I am referring to the rate at which one can generate value.
Software itself has value (eg, a client-facing web service). Therefore an IDE, which may require an investment to get past the learning curve, can have a productivity benefit as it can make generating software (and thus value) more efficient.
Do notes themselves have value? I would argue not really. For the most part things like "life planners" / "task managers" I've noticed are highly intricate but require considerable upkeep to maintain. Time that can be used to actually generate value.
Incredibly valuable for me. When exploring something new, I journal as I go. If a side task has to be parked, I can pick up again months later because I use it as a knowledgebase. Also, a quick scan for #gotcha in my notes reminds me of subtle bugs and workarounds in tools and processes that are easily forgotten. I also create quick reference charts for tools I want to become familiar. I hashtag every new note as if I'm making a Twitter post, so things are linked in a useful way. I usually have Obsidian open near the IDE.
Does the software itself have value? Isn’t it what people do with the software that really has value? The software sat on a floppy disk has pretty low value.
I’d then argue that software has as much value as notes do. It’s about what you do with it/them, what it/they enable - that counts.
But both software and notes are therefore extremely valuable to the activity of doing.
My notes are my software, heck I even call my note system “LifeOS”, which makes that even more apparent.
This is a pre-clinical study that is designed to model an aspect of a "traumatic" event and assess how the treatment condition (hydrocortisone) can affect behavior. Moreover, this experiment is designed to probe the effects of trauma in the moments immediately after the traumatic event, where the stress response is initiated. This is likely the period of time where the most synaptic changes occur. Of course, this paper doesn't directly posit that forgetting thoughts associated with trauma is therapeutic, as that would require an empirical study that include patients with PTSD.
Also, the purpose of therapy, such as CBT, is not to fixate on one's current situation, but be able to unlearn feelings of trauma / anxiety from the event. This is done by engaging with a trained professional who can help the patient carefully break down their thoughts and feelings. Reflecting on a traumatic situation with a partner is different from reflecting on a traumatic situation amongst oneself.
Ischemia results in significant pathology to all organ systems. A few examples: ischemic infarction of brain tissue is what causes stroke. Ischemia caused by blockage of coronary arteries is what causes myocardial infarction (heart attacks). This type of cellular injury is omnipresent with many different pathways leading to it.
