[Genuine Realist]

I wouldn't exclude the market, but I viewed this statement as saying it probably happened in rural Hubei province rather than urban Wuhan.

Rather, the experts interviewed by NPR all believe that the virus was transmitted between animals and humans in nature, as has happened in previous outbreaks — from Ebola to the Marburg virus — and with other known coronaviruses such as SARS and MERS.

"The real risk is in the wild in the way people interact with wildlife around the world," says Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance in New York City, a group that researches the origins of pandemics. "That's where we need to be focused if we want to really do something about preventing the next pandemic."

Doesn't mean the final transmission from animal to human didn't happen in the seafood market, of course.  But my sense is that a better explanation is that an infected person transmitted it to numerous other people in the market.  That explains the inconsistent association between early cases and the market, including one of the first patients diagnosed having no ties to it (or to the viral lab).

BC

Right, that was my point. Just from a pure probabilistic perspective it's likely that the first transfer was pretty rural (the Vox article had a pretty alarming statistic that some low-but-nontrivial percentage of a surveyed population had antibodies for bat viruses), but at the same time it seems likely that this would've just been a couple random deaths in rural China if not for the market. How it got between the rural place and the market is kind of immaterial, in my mind.

Does anyone know how to edit title headers, so I can edit the idiot typos here?

[Genuine Realist]

I wouldn't exclude the market, but I viewed this statement as saying it probably happened in rural Hubei province rather than urban Wuhan.

Rather, the experts interviewed by NPR all believe that the virus was transmitted between animals and humans in nature, as has happened in previous outbreaks — from Ebola to the Marburg virus — and with other known coronaviruses such as SARS and MERS.

"The real risk is in the wild in the way people interact with wildlife around the world," says Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance in New York City, a group that researches the origins of pandemics. "That's where we need to be focused if we want to really do something about preventing the next pandemic."

Doesn't mean the final transmission from animal to human didn't happen in the seafood market, of course.  But my sense is that a better explanation is that an infected person transmitted it to numerous other people in the market.  That explains the inconsistent association between early cases and the market, including one of the first patients diagnosed having no ties to it (or to the viral lab).

BC

Right, that was my point. Just from a pure probabilistic perspective it's likely that the first transfer was pretty rural (the Vox article had a pretty alarming statistic that some low-but-nontrivial percentage of a surveyed population had antibodies for bat viruses), but at the same time it seems likely that this would've just been a couple random deaths in rural China if not for the market. How it got between the rural place and the market is kind of immaterial, in my mind.

Does anyone know how to edit title headers, so I can edit the idiot typos here?