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Friday, March 6th, 2020

The conspiracy theories about the origins of the coronavirus, debunked

Author:     Eliza Barclay
Source:     Vox
Publication Date:     Mar 4, 2020, 5:50pm EST
 Link: The conspiracy theories about the origins of the coronavirus, debunked
Stephan:   For me, one of the most notable things about the coronavirus pandemic is the buckets, carts, trucks, entire trains of disinformation and crap being put out on this topic. Part of the reason for this flourishing emetic spewing, I think, is the fact that for the first time in my memory when the country is faced with a medical emergency citizens cannot trust a word coming out of the White House or the president's mouth. It's not just the willfully ignorant and inaccurate things criminal Trump says. It is that he doesn't even seem to be intellectually capable of understanding what a virus is. Readers have sent me all manner of stuff, the worse being a "psychic" telling everyone that Covid-19 is actually a biological terror weapon created by the CIA and the CDC to stop Trump's re-election. So here are some actual facts.

Workers inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, in 2017. Conspiracy theorists have conjectured the lab is the origin of the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak; scientific evidence shows it’s not.
Credit: AFP via Getty

The signs that the small, scattered coronavirus outbreak in the United States could spiral into a larger-scale problem are growing. A new analysis, first reported by STAT, found there are likely now 500 to 600 (mostly undetected) cases of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, in Washington state alone. “January 1 in Wuhan was March 1 in Seattle,” computational biologist Trevor Bedford, who did the analysis, told STAT, referring to the Chinese city where the virus emerged and began rapidly infecting humans.

The decisions federal and local public health officials make this week — to test more people with symptoms, inform the public about the risk, isolate the sick, and institute other measures — will be crucial. So will the speed at which they execute them.

This could be a make-or-break moment where US cases remain relatively low and […]

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