The Octonaut

So your assertion is that we need to seriously consider that a ‘wild’ coronavirus with the same signature as Covid-19 evolved somewhere in China, spread to Italy and elsewhere in Europe and probably dozens of other untested places in the summer of 2019, and - coincidentally - Covid-19 itself mutated in bushmeat or was engineered in Wuhan in an unrelated zoonotic transmission or, uh, “biocrime”?

Which of us is stretching probabilities to breaking point for political purposes, ‘HK’?

I don’t know. But I don’t see how that’s relevant to Wuhan having a lab that studies coronaviruses if the pandemic didn’t start in Wuhan, which even now is still repeated as if it was truth by proper journalists and DW alike.

Covid’s presence in Europe before Wuhan was known all the way back in June 2020: https://www.reuters.com/article/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/italy-sewage-study-suggests-covid-19-was-there-in-december-2019-idUSKBN23Q1J8/

By November 2020 it was pushed back as far as September 2019: https://newseu.cgtn.com/news/2020-11-17/COVID-19-was-spreading-in-Italy-by-September-2019-study-indicates-VuSqUttP8s/index.html

Here’s a scientific source:

Overall, the results of this blind retesting of a selected set of samples indicate the presence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in some SMILE samples collected in the prepandemic period. The oldest samples found positive for IgM by both laboratories were collected on 10 October 2019 (Lombardy), 11 November 2019 (Lombardy) and 5 February 2020 (Lazio), the latter with neutralizing antibodies. Two additional samples collected on 17 December 2019 (Campania) and 28 January 2020 (Lombardy) tested as IgG positive by VisMederi and positive for IgG S1 and IgG S1+NP by Erasmus. Additional IgM positive cases could have been detected also by Erasmus by lowering the cut-off of the commercial IgM assay. The older among these putative additional IgM positive samples was collected on 3 September 2019 in the Veneto region, one of the first and mostly severely affected COVID-19 regions.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8778320/

Removed by mod

Because it makes no sense. Covid has been detected in waste water in Italy from summer 2019. That’s not to say it originated in Italy but that connecting the Wuhan outbreak in December 2019 to a lab - or indeed a wetmarket - makes no sense.

Does it have to be specifically FOSS characters? You could have a huge roster with public domain characters (too).