"Unfortunately, Dr. Campbell repeats the disproved theory that the Wuhan wet market was the vector for the initial introduction of the virus. The Lancet disproved this weeks ago." I just read through the Lancet article and I couldn't find a smoking gun, other than that patient zero had no connection with the market that they could find. This doesn't disprove the zoonotic origin theory, it just means that the market may not be the origin, or that they don't know his connection with it. The market does seem to be the place where the initial outbreak began though. With an R0 of 5 or 6 it may be impossible to pin down exactly where this guy got it from, especially considering how little was understood about the danger at that time. People weren't exactly being cautious at that point. He and others were probably spreading it for at least a week while asymptomatic. While writing this, I went and checked James Lions-Weiler's (the guy who was quoted as proving the engineered-virus hypothesis) Twitter feed and he refutes the engineered-virus hypothesis in this recent video here. I've been skeptical of this notion since day 1 because of something that Martin Armstrong pointed out early on in the outbreak, which is that the fatality rates are much too small to be engineered bioweapons. He figures that 30+% fatality rate would be necessary as an effective bioweapon. This is not to say that it disproves government mishandling of viruses in labs, but we don't exactly have reliable information to that effect.

Of particular concern to me in all of this isn't the origin though, it's the combination of that large R0 number and the apparent fatality rate when you look at the data found here that you were so kind as to share with us. One further thing that adds some more weight to the fear factor about the above data is that in that video above by Dr. John Campbell, he shows from the cited research paper that the time between hospital admission and discharge vs. hospital admission and death is roughly the same at 11.5 and 11.2 days respectively. What this means is that the real-time data that we're seeing should be a pretty accurate reflection of the fatality rate when taking the number of deaths and dividing by the number of recovered. Last I checked that number was just a bit over 9%. The silver lining here is that now that strategies have been developed and time has progressed, the fatality rate seems to have shrunk considerably since I first brought this up on your blog when it seemed to be closer to 26%. The converse to that is that 9+% is a near-literal decimation of any populations that are infected with the virus.

My hope here is that I'm missing some critical piece of information and that the rate really is only around 2%. As usual, the biggest problem in all of this is how close to the chest they're keeping all of their information. As a result I'm at a loss as to where they're coming up with their fatality rates given the data that they themselves are presenting.