COVID-19 origins, again
With an announcement by the DOE, that they sorta think COVID-19 leaked from a lab, the discussion is back on. But there is no new evidence, just a mention of ‘intel’.
I am not an intelligence professional, but I have a few related
questions. US intel on this could come from phone intercepts, emails
collected in real time or hacked out more recently, or from chatting
up Chinese virologists at conferences, etc., but this will give the US
at best a more limited view than the Chinese govt has. No doubt there
were calls, emails, reports issued, panic and alarm as China became
aware of the outbreak and tried to contain it. But how likely is it
that the Chinese govt or scientific officials knew the origins of
COVID-19 early on, or worked it out later on? If Chinese officials
don’t know, an effective intelligence operation can’t extract an
answer.
How could China know? If one or more people at the Wuhan Institute of
Virology came down with COVID-19, passed it on to family and
acquaintances, and then COVID-19 spread more widely, they could track
these connections. Classic gumshoe epidemiology. But that did not
happen.
Chinese doctors only became aware of a new disease in Dec 2019, health
officials jumped in by the end of Dec, and samples were collected from
Jan 2019 – March 2020 in the Wuhan market. These samples and those
from early cases in the region have all been sequenced, published, and
shared. This was close to the origin of the pandemic, and it is
unlikely China has any better information on what happened than the
rest of us have. COVID-19 passing into humans much earlier and only
becoming pandemic in 2019 is ruled out by the analysis of COVID-19
sequences.
The best guess at the origin of COVID-19 remains a couple of papers looking at the evidence, the epidemiological evidence of when and where early cases arose, and how it was transmitted, and the genomic evidence from sequencing of COVID-19 in early patients, and comparing these to each other to make a tree of early -> later virus genomes, and to see how the early viral genomes in human patients differ from wild relatives and samples found in the Wuhan live animal market. This sort of analysis can also provide estimates of time–how long the virus has been circulating in human hosts. (ref1, ref2, ref3).