By Jim Geraghty
Monday, May 11, 2020
Rarely do you see a network put
so much effort into downplaying their own potential scoop as NBC News does
here:
A private analysis of cellphone
location data purports to show that a high-security Wuhan laboratory studying
coronaviruses shut down in October, three sources briefed on the matter told
NBC News. U.S. spy agencies are reviewing the document, but intelligence
analysts examined and couldn’t confirm a similar theory previously, two senior
officials say.
The report — obtained by the
London-based NBC News Verification Unit — says there was no cellphone activity
in a high-security portion of the Wuhan Institute of Virology from Oct. 7
through Oct. 24, 2019, and that there may have been a “hazardous event”
sometime between Oct. 6 and Oct. 11.
It offers no direct evidence of a
shutdown, or any proof for the theory that the virus emerged accidentally from
the lab.
The first thing we need to know, and that these sources
and this report do not provide, is what the “normal” level of cell phone use in
the high-security portion of the Wuhan Institute of Virology is. If it did
indeed drop to zero, was that a huge drop compared to the normal activity? Was
there usually very little phone activity in this part of the building?
Somewhere in between? The bigger the drop, the more significant this is — and
less likely it was driven by something like the bosses yelling at their
employees for spending too much time on their phones at work or something. It
is also fair to wonder how complete this cellphone location data is.
The time period of the lack of cell phone activity is a
little early in light of what we know about the outbreak, but not by a great
deal. The NBC News report states that “the first known case of coronavirus in
China has been traced back to Nov. 17, but some researchers are beginning to
question that timeline, given that a case has been documented in France in
December.”
The November 17 date comes from an unnamed source showing
a Chinese
government document to the South China Morning Post.
The French case is somewhat disruptive to the timeline of
previously-known cases, but not by a lot. The French patient’s samples were
collected at a hospital on December 27, but he was not initially tested for
SARS-CoV-2. (Almost no one had heard of it then.) Doctors recently went back
and retested his sample and now believe he was infected with the virus between
December 14 and 22. What’s particularly intriguing is this patient had not
returned from China or anywhere abroad, although “the patient’s wife worked at
a supermarket near Charles de Gaulle airport and could have come into contact
with people who had recently arrived from China.” By December 21, Wuhan doctors
begin to notice a “cluster of pneumonia cases with an unknown cause.” It is
possible that sometime in early to mid December, an asymptomatic carrier traveled
from Wuhan to Paris, then shopped in the supermarket, spread it to the wife,
and she then spread it to this man.
Finally, if there was some sort of hazardous event that
made everyone leave the “high security portion” of the Wuhan Institute of
Virology in October, that event may have been driven by something hazardous
that was completely different from SARS-CoV-2. That said, if the WIV had a
separate, unrelated, serious accident in October, it would be further evidence
to refute the never-that-plausible “the Chinese researchers were simply too
diligent and professional to ever have an accidental release of a virus from
their facilities” argument.
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