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Originally Posted by GGG
Aren’t you inferring a lot in saying this is evidence it was man made. Doesn’t this support that it was an unknown virus as it was treated as unremarkable by the laboratory that sequenced it originally and then the government tried to cover it up.
Also interesting is that the US knew that there was this viral outbreak going on and didn’t somehow flag this new virus sequence being uploaded and allowed it to expire. Though that might just be a function of how these databases work.
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New viruses get added to the databases all the time, so that wouldn't have been noteworthy on the US's side, nor would it have created any kind of alarm bells.
However, the same is also true on the Chinese side. Novel human pathogens get discovered and sequenced relatively regularly (I think 4-6 times a year in recent years), so the first step from that happening isn't outright panic, particularly since they likely weren't even sure human-to-human transmission was happening. The first assumption would have been that this was a case of animal-to-human transmission which required further study. And that was (presumably) just one sample that was sequenced in December, so they didn't necessarily know other cases were related until they eliminated other known causes of the illness and sequenced additional samples, which takes time.
Once they realized that there was a real outbreak and the novel virus was the cause, obviously best practise would have been to notify the WHO and other organizations earlier than January 11th. But we're talking about China here. And all the histrionics about the practical implications of the sequence being published maybe a week later than it should have been are ridiculous. The sequence didn't inform mitigation measures outside of China, so it wouldn't have sped any of that up. At most, you could say vaccine research was slowed down by a few days.