Our Long Bets and Predictions about 02020
Not sure why they're so quick to write off Long Bet #9. It's highly likely we'll reach 1,000,000 worldwide casualties from Covid-19 during a 6-month period before the end of year (defined in the bet's terms as "hospitalizations").And if the hypothesis turns out to be true that it was an accidental release from one of Wuhan's 2 laboratories doing bat virus research, that's definitely a "bioerror" under the terms of the bet.There's significant circumstantial evidence it could have been a lab accident(early Chinese reporting about the index case, 1 lab location a few blocks away from seafood market, bat species, earlier lab accident, etc), but nothing more at this point. But we may know more by the end of the year.Edit: This is not the wild conspiracy theory about a bioengineered virus in a weapons lab. This is a hypothesis about accidental bat pee on a lab worker conducting routine research, or some similar accident (such accidental releases are confirmed to have happened twice with SARS-Cov-1 virus in a Beijing lab). Laboratory-acquired infections do happen, sometimes with deadly consequences. In my mind, it's the most feasible scenario at this point, given no one has provided proof that bats were even sold at the seafood market that was blamed. And we know that many officials were eager to cover this all up.