We've had two spillovers now of sarbecoviruses and the first one hit a completely unrelated city. The other one happened in Wuhan, which is the biggest city in central China and its "catchement area" is probably fairly wide around it.
It does appear that they spillover in wet markets in big cities.
The level of coincidence here may look like rolling a 1d20 two times and the second time getting a natural 1.
> The level of coincidence here may look like rolling a 1d20 two times and the second time getting a natural 1.
Or a more related and much bigger coincidence: a man was killed by a nerve agent in what appeared to be a targeted attack on the home of a Russian defector approximately 10 miles from the UK's main lab studying nerve agents. Which is a similar distance between the Wuhan lab and wet market, though the UK version is a rural backwater rather than a major regional capital. Sometimes relative geographical proximity coincidences are just that. (if you think there's something to the geographic proximity of Porton Down to the Salisbury poisonings, you have to try to explain away an even more remarkable coincidence that two Russians protected by the Russian government took a very short holiday to 'see the cathedral' and somehow stumbled into the same boring suburb the nerve agent was left in on the same day. And the decision of presumed target Sergei Skripal to live there... )
Wuhan would look like less of a coincidence if it had been accompanied by a characteristic Chinese coverup "the researchers have retired and wish to spend their time not talking to the media" rather than something very uncharacteristic of a Chinese government coverup (scientific papers releasing data on origins which unconnected non-Chinese virologists and epidemiologists generally find credible) or if China had been way out ahead rather than miles behind in their vaccine efforts.
Lab leaks are enough of a known phenomenon not to be ruled out as wildly improbable, but the coincidence of the virus that leaks out of the Wuhan lab happening to be one they hadn't documented and happening to plausibly spread from an epicentre which contained the other most likely vector for the transmission of zoonotic viruses in Wuhan sounds... pretty much as big as the coincidence of a zoonotic virus being in the same major city as a lab for studying zoonotic transmissions of similar viruses prevalent in that large region.
> Or a more related and much bigger coincidence: a man was killed by a nerve agent in what appeared to be a targeted attack on the home of a Russian defector approximately 10 miles from the UK's main lab studying nerve agents.
That's a good one, I'm going to have to try to remember that.
We've had two spillovers now of sarbecoviruses and the first one hit a completely unrelated city. The other one happened in Wuhan, which is the biggest city in central China and its "catchement area" is probably fairly wide around it.
It does appear that they spillover in wet markets in big cities.
The level of coincidence here may look like rolling a 1d20 two times and the second time getting a natural 1.