I think you were partly right on this, so wanted to update you in case you're interested. Science has a new interview with Zhi Zhengli who also no longer supports the idea that it was probably from the market:

"However, two papers published in late January revealed that up to 45% of the first confirmed patients—including four of the five earliest cases—did not have any ties to the market, casting doubt on the theory that it was the origin. Shi agrees: “The Huanan seafood market may just be a crowded location where a cluster of early novel coronavirus patients were found.”

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/trump-owes-us-apolog...

How did you determine the general scientific consensus?

Reading peer-reviewed papers & following field leaders on Twitter.

I have experience in academia, so it might be easier to parse because of that, but news articles are certainly not sufficient.

Please don't spew falsehoods and add 'general concesus' to it.

There are reports that the French team that traveled in October in Wuhan for mil. sports games, got infected by it. So, that it was at circulating in Wuhan at least since October, even most probably: early september.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/08/covid-19-pandemi...

Whether that's likely or not can be estimated by extrapolating case numbers from January back in time into 2019 and using a reasonable estimate for the R0 value without any measures against the spreading of the disease. Even if you don't trust the Chinese numbers, the estimate should be roughly in the right ballpark, since we certainly didn't have millions of deaths in Wuhan in January. The initial exponential growth phase is similar in all regions with comparable population density.

I haven't crunched these numbers, but a start in early September seems unlikely to me - call it a hunch, based on looking at the initial growth curves.

The Telegraph is not a reliable source for anything connected to covid.

The Telegraph is not a reliable source for anything.

Newspapers are not a reliable source for news.

The Telegraph only qualifies as a newspaper in the loosest of terms, in that it also sometimes reports news and is published in dead tree form.

Why did you quote me 'general concesus' and then misspell the word?

I'm not going to respond to the rest of the comment suggesting the Telegraph should be part of my consideration when judging the science.

He cited papers, you referenced a "general scientific consensus". This is a gun fight, sir, so you'd best put that knife away.

He cited two scientific papers, one which is peer-reviewed and indicates that the virus originated in Wuhan and one which is an un-peer reviewed pre-print on medRxiv, funded by a private company with interest in promoting the efficacy of wastewater monitoring, that Covid was present in wastewater. It's worth looking in to, but hardly discredits the widely-accepted Wuhan origin yet.

In your poorly fit analogy, the scientific consensus would be the gun to the single, unreviewed paper's knife.

I see you’ve played knifey spoony before!