Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember... But… but… but… If it escapes from the lab, it escapes into people working at the lab who then have lots of close indoor contact with others working at the lab. Thus the first sign we see of the disease is a huge cluster among lab workers. Did we see such a cluster? No. We see no antibodies in lab workers. We see three lab workers catching what look to be bad cases of the flu in November 2019, and then no radiation until we get the superspreader event at the market:
"No, we should not be studying dangerous viruses in labs in the middle of large cities. With nuclear weapons, there is a reason we built Lawrence Livermore lab very far indeed from the university in Berkeley that initially staffed it. "
Was Los Alamos chosen for safety, as you imply, or for secrecy? What about the locations of Ft. Detrick in Maryland, Porton Down in the UK? As a counterfactual, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine that handles some pretty nasty tropical bugs is located in Central London. Smallpox is still maintained in Atlanta Georgia. On balance, it seems that the evidence suggests that secret research centers may or may not be located in remote areas, but public research centers are located in cities where the best specialists are likely to want to live.
It is my understanding that new transmissible diseases emerge from animal populations (farmed or wild) and that outbreaks are primarily from these contacts, not disease study centers. Think of the BSG outbreak in the UK from poorly processed beef to feed cows, the period swine fever outbreaks on farms, most recently in China, and of course the Ebola outbreaks in tropical Africa.
I know that there is at least one BSL3 (biosafety lab level 3) facility on the Berkeley campus. I don't know if there are any BSL4's on campus. I don't think the one I know of studies anything terrible like anthrax, but still one should not assume that such research is not being done in the metro area.
"No, we should not be studying dangerous viruses in labs in the middle of large cities. With nuclear weapons, there is a reason we built Lawrence Livermore lab very far indeed from the university in Berkeley that initially staffed it. "
Was Los Alamos chosen for safety, as you imply, or for secrecy? What about the locations of Ft. Detrick in Maryland, Porton Down in the UK? As a counterfactual, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine that handles some pretty nasty tropical bugs is located in Central London. Smallpox is still maintained in Atlanta Georgia. On balance, it seems that the evidence suggests that secret research centers may or may not be located in remote areas, but public research centers are located in cities where the best specialists are likely to want to live.
It is my understanding that new transmissible diseases emerge from animal populations (farmed or wild) and that outbreaks are primarily from these contacts, not disease study centers. Think of the BSG outbreak in the UK from poorly processed beef to feed cows, the period swine fever outbreaks on farms, most recently in China, and of course the Ebola outbreaks in tropical Africa.
I know that there is at least one BSL3 (biosafety lab level 3) facility on the Berkeley campus. I don't know if there are any BSL4's on campus. I don't think the one I know of studies anything terrible like anthrax, but still one should not assume that such research is not being done in the metro area.