Thread
That Worobey et al test is essentially nonsense from a causality point of view.

Nobody discusses that the market was a superspreader event.

What matters is whether there are earlier cases, or some early cases not related to the market.

As it is, yes there are early cases not linked to the market.

For instance the accountant, Mr Chen, who never went to the market and believes he was infected at a local hospital far away on the other side of the river on the 8 Dec, or at around that time on public transport.

That simple case is the death knell of the fancy market zoonosis hypothesis.

Mr Chen lived and worked very far away from the market on the other side of the river, and was only reported because he transferred to an hospital close to the market (where a relative worked).

He transferred because he was not happy of his ineffectual treatment in Jangxia hospital.

So he went to the top emergency department in Wuhan under Ai Fen, on the other side of the river, close to the market.

And he became the whistleblower case!
Ai Fen did an excellent job - and got reprimanded for that.

How many more patients from the other side of the river did not get properly diagnosed and did not transfer to a top emergency department?
Mr Chen was a middle income person with relations: a relative working at the top emergency department in Wuhan.

What about ordinary people?

Tellingly, Worobey actually tried to imply a fake link between Chen and the market in an earlier Science article.

The socio-economical factors are also very important to understand the non-reporting dynamic and key absence of CT-scans in the early days, across lower income oldies:

And as you can guess, the inconvenient Mr Chen was never properly traced.

Wrong side of the river!

But there are also indications of many more early cases on the ‘wrong’ side of the river.

There are also precise records of arbitrary deletion of cases entered in the national reporting system by a top tier hospital on the ‘wrong’ side of the river on the 9 Jan 20.

If it does not fit, delete it.

And then there were obviously the reporting biases pushed by the Wuhan Health Commission, likely to try yo obfuscate human-2-human transmission.

Starting with a required link to the market.

I reported many of these issues here:

What matters in the end is that Worobey et al and Pekar et al are just blissfully ignoring all these structural issues.

Neither an avalanche of p-values or some fancy modelling (relying on some very specific parametrisation) can replace reliability and meaning in the data used.
Mentions
See All