> I don't buy the escaped/released from a lab theories espoused here and on Facebook and the like. Apparently the mutations within the SARS-COV-2 found in humans compared to the bat virus are purely random and hence the thing is not or very unlikely genetically engineered.

Only the conspiracy theorists claim it was an "engineered bio-weapon". The most likely explanation is that it just escaped involuntarily from the lab. Why from the lab, and not the wet market?

- that lab was specifically researching coronavirii in bats

- there are reports researchers there got splashed with blood and fecies of bats [0]

- the researcher in question (Huang Yan Lin), the likely patient zero, disappeared without a trace, both physically and online [0]

- the horseshoe bats that most likely hosted the virus weren't even sold on the wuhan wet market, according to several eye witnesses

- there are no known horseshoe bat colonies in a 900km diameter around wuhan

- the lab is just 280 meters away from the wet market, so the market was a very convenient scape goat

And why was COVID-19 not engineered? Simple, it is not necessary to explain the pandemic potential. All of this is not new and there were warnings about exactly this happening:

- it was long known that horseshoe bats were a dangerous reservoir of SARS-CoV like virii [1]

- there were US simulations held on how to respond to a respiratory virus with chinese origin in 2019 [2]

- there were WHO warnings on how respiratory RNA virii are prime candidates for the next pandemic [3]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU (starts at ~3:00) [1] https://twitter.com/_benoux_/status/1245381552672059392?s=20 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimson_Contagion [3] https://twitter.com/bmiloy/status/1238541860542377984/photo/...