Not that it will fit a western centric ideology but there is zero mystery with people going into hospitals in Nov. It would be surprising if it weren’t so.
It’s flu season and Chinese don’t go zoom their Dr, they go and check into the hospital.
In other countries, it would be considered sociopathy to go to work with a flu, but we’re all Real Americans so anything different means… conspiracy.
I'm actually aware of the cultural differences there.
Going to the hospital is not usually the same thing as being "hospitalized" though, and it would be relevant for us to make that distinction to determine how much that tidbit pushes us one way or the other. I had originally read "hospitalized" some time ago, but i just checked the intelligence briefing and it definitely does not indicate actual hospitalization.
So that intel doesn't push us one way or the other very much. Although perhaps the absence of known lab-worker hospitalizations is an argument against the lab-leak though.
If one were either the director or a senior leader of a more-or-less covert biolab doing research that is definitely supposed not to be discovered, would you have done your job if you had not established a procedure for medical treatment of sick or infected employees using local and probably covert resources? - And likely including local isolation of infected or potentially infected people? Whether or not people from this supposed type of biolab turns up at public hospitals does not seem to indicate much.
It’s flu season and Chinese don’t go zoom their Dr, they go and check into the hospital.
In other countries, it would be considered sociopathy to go to work with a flu, but we’re all Real Americans so anything different means… conspiracy.