> So why would Covid-19 even need to come from a lab? We (humans) had wet markets filled with animals, including the very bats that carry the base virus. It's the perfect breeding ground to create a pandemic-level virus and probably a few thousand more viruses of lesser impact.

The question of how it got to Wuhan all the way from Southern China remains unanswered. There weren't any bats sold on the wet markets, nor has any other host animal been identified.

The virologists working in Wuhan did travel all the way to Southern China to collect bat coronavirus samples and they did perform gain-of-function experiments. Viruses - even highly pathogenic ones - have escaped labs on numerous occasions. There is a plausible scenario here.

There is another plausible scenario, which is that "ground zero" for Sars-CoV-2 is actually Southern China, just like Sars-CoV-1. However, the virus wasn't discovered there first, because it didn't cause enough illness. The outbreak in Wuhan, the 9th largest city in China, would've been discovered by chance.

Good points, and I tend to think the 'escaped from a lab' case is at least as strong as the zoonotic one.

A small counterpoint though -- the market is the Huanan market, i.e. specialising in south china sourced or styled food. I would not be surprised if some exotic animals were there but never admitted to.

Although reasonable, one theory ("the bat coronavirus was transported by scientists to the lab that studies bat coronaviruses") involves no illigal activity. On the other hand the counter-theory ("there was illegal bat trafficking from a small mine in Yunnan") involves speculation that something happened that we don't know about. Strictly speaking, the lab leak theory has more observed evidence. Presumably the Chinese government would have identified and explained if they found bat traffickers.

We know the lab was aware of RaTG13 - they produced a sequence quickly that no-one else had seen. I know nothing about the situation but it would be interesting to know where exactly the sample was being sequenced. I doubt they did it in the mine, samples must have been transported to some lab.

I used to think 99% chance zoonotic, but the fact the similar virus was known to the lab was enough to drag me to thinking it is probably a toss up. Lab leaks do happen, this lab was studying bat coronaviruses. It is possible.

> On the other hand the counter-theory ("there was illegal bat trafficking from a small mine in Yunnan")

One theory is that people mine bat guano from caves, so there's no need for them to ever touch a dead bat.

>he similar virus was known to the lab was enough to drag me to thinking it is probably a toss up.

A human generated virus wouldn't be similar in this way to a wild one. You would take a candidate virus and splice in genetic material from a different one. The new virus would match 100% in most places and then be completely different in a few places.

This is not how they conduct gain of function research. It's uses serial passage (using biological hosts and the virus's own variations). This produces vary little evidence of manipulation.

> The question of how it got to Wuhan all the way from Southern China remains unanswered.

It's also important to remember that the related virus we're talking about in southern China was identified in 2013. More than six years before the outbreak.

It didn't stay still. It hopped around, bat to bat, maybe to other animals. We don't have the history of the virus since then. It could have very well made the jump the humans or some other animal, years ago but only recently made the last few mutations to become the beast it is now.

Plus, it's a virus. It didn't take one path, it took all of them that it could. Each virus created a million more, repeat ad-infinitum.

So the idea that there's some mystery to how it traveled to Wuhan doesn't bother me. Viruses get around.

>>"The virologists working in Wuhan did travel all the way to Southern China to collect bat coronavirus samples and they did perform gain-of-function experiments. Viruses - even highly pathogenic ones - have escaped labs on numerous occasions. There is a plausible scenario here."

Another plausible scenario, in my opinion, is that the virus was brought to Wuhan by the virologists (in the virologist or their helpers) but never escaped from the lab itself.

If you have a bunch of people periodically going to interact with the bats, how improbable is that they get infected of something (unknowingly) on site?

It's very unlikely that you'd get a one step transfer from a bat that yielded a spike protein with the level of affinity it has for human ACE2. If you look at that protein alone, the most-likely proximal hosts are primates. If we seriously believe in zoonotic transfer, we should be looking at those populations, and understanding how orangutans and bonobos infiltrated Wuhan and transmitted the virus to unwitting humans.

The other recent coronavirus spillovers actually have rather low infectivity that increases with the course of the epidemic through adaptive mutations. But amazingly, with SARS2, it appeared already fully adapted.

The phylogenetic tree makes a clear statement about how long SARS2 has been circulating in humans. At the publication of the genome sequence there were only a handful (~4?) of mutations known and most SARS-CoV-2 genomes were, incredibly, nearly identical. See https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global. If we tend to see one mutation per transmission, that would mean that the spillover happened in October or November 2019, and almost certainly in Wuhan. All SARS-CoV-2 we've observed fits into this single tree, and there is no evidence of any previous progenitor strains. This means that SARS-CoV-2 was fully-adapted from its most-recent common ancestor. What are the odds of that happening directly from a bat?

We're only now seeing, with b1117, a big phenotypic jump related to changes in the spike protein. It has arisen in a context that suggests that it may also be the result of strange environmental conditions for the virus that are capable of accelerating its exploration of the solution space. A widely-considered hypothesis is that it arose in an immunocompromised patient receiving antibody treatment and convalescent plasma, both standard practice in the UK. In this context the virus could have achieved extremely high population (~ many candidate solutions, faster evolutionary computation) and feedback about the immune response of the entire population (to the degree that they would have received multiple donations of plasma).

The only thing we REALLY know is that these types of coronaviruses originate in Southern China and somehow got to the point of being suspiciously well adapted to ACE2 by the time it exploded in Wuhan.

That, however, can also be achieved purely by natural causes over a long time - not just in a lab. Maybe Wuhan is simply the point at which the first very infectious form of SARS-CoV-2 occurred - not the first overall occurrence of any SARS-CoV-2 variant. And it provided a perfect environment to spread at its wet markets. If the virus originated in the West, maybe we would be shitting all over meat processing facilities now?

So, how many people would need to get infected to facilitate these mutations? We could possibly have missed SARS-CoV-2 infections with earlier virus strains that were vastly less infectious. It would take quite a lot of people to raise suspicions of anything other going on than nominal incidents of flu-like symptoms. So maybe the initial SARS-2 was basically SARS-1 with much less incidence of severe symptoms - so it slipped under the radar until it mutated, exploded in incidence and suddenly produced overwhelming hospitilization rates.

It's plausible, and could be proven very easily that this happened. Presumably, some progenitor strain is out there, spreading more slowly and making less of a mess. Eventually, a SARS-CoV-2 screen will turn it up and we'll sequence it. Then we will see a strain that's diverged from all other sequences in the phylogenetic tree, with a common ancestor back further than ~1ya.

But this depends on catching that strain and evolution has likely led to its near full displacement by more infectious strains at this time.

>>"It's very unlikely that you'd get a one step transfer from a bat that yielded a spike protein with the level of affinity it has for human ACE2. If you look at that protein alone, the most-likely proximal hosts are primates"

I'm not qualified to have an opinion about that, but it seems to me that if we accept that premise, and the primate jump looks improbable, the conclusion is that the virus have to come from a lab where it has been modified.

On the other hand, many experts are saying "we don't know, it's probably natural". So, it seems to me that the scientific consensus is giving different prior probabilities to zoonotic transfer that you gave in that statement.

This is an anonymous appeal to authority, but FWIW I am a biologist and I am not convinced of any origin story. We lack evidence in every direction. Although our prior is that it's zoonotic, other experts I know acknowledge the possibility that we are looking at a lab leak. We simply don't have enough information to say.

However, there is very strong pressure to reassure the public that it's not lab-based, which would look bad for scientists and our generally pro-social efforts to help the world. I think this is misguided, because people are not stupid. They also can also observe the profound lack of evidence for zoonotic transfer, which frankly makes these assertions look like a coverup. It would be helpful if the scientific community were more honest and scientific about this issue. We should not jump to conclusions without evidence.

Yeah. Unfortunately public health researchers/biologists have very little credibility at this point so appeals to their authority won't work. In particular arguments of the form "we need more evidence" look weak given how many enormous leaps of faith the supposedly scientific establishment has been willing to make on the basis of no evidence at all for the past year, e.g. masks, lockdowns, asymptomatic infection (apparently now contradicted by a large study of >90% of the entire population of Wuhan!), now vaccines are being advertised as totally safe even though trial protocols are being abandoned left and right.

Public health research is really worrying, frankly. The quality gap between epidemiology papers I read in the last 12 months and computer science papers are shocking. Epidemiology routinely publishes papers that contain major errors that the authors clearly knew about and chose to ignore or cover up. The Flaxman paper is an example of how absurdly fraudulent it can get, yet we're told constantly that the "experts" have reached a "consensus" that isn't to be questioned.

At this point I'm pretty much ready to believe it came from a lab simply because scientists are claiming it didn't. My prior for public health researchers being honest has dropped through the floor.

I just indicated that I have spent much of my life thinking about these things. You don't have to believe that this gives me any insight, but like I said it might help you understand that I'm not just parroting some theory I've read, I'm working on it directly.

I understand your concerns about public health research. Have you thought about it could be done better? Curious what you think.

Computer science papers have their own quality problems. A shocking percentage of them don't include source code even when they describe experimental results. Here you have a field that could realize an ancient dream of perfectly describing their work, and yet they fail to do it. This is an obvious way that it could improve. What's the equivalent for epi?

Not reliably sharing source code is a big problem in health modelling too, it's an issue across academia. The last set of CS papers I read did all publish their code though, at least for the ones where I cared to look. Perhaps this problem is fading away with time.

Yeah, places like DeepMind or OpenAI don't, partly because their papers are extended press releases rather than precise descriptions of how to recreate their results. OK, that's fine, they aren't academia so they're paying for their own work. If they choose to write a paper at all it's a pure bonus over what's basically expected of them. For government funded research it's different of course.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about what could be done better and how. The problem is there's this overwhelming number of problems that track back to a few root causes that are basically intractable in the current social environment. Take bogus citations, or use of obsolete data. Completely standard in epidemiology to write papers that use values for IFR or other key variables that are 8 months old when far more up to date data is available. Or what about claims with citations in which the cited paper doesn't support the claim being made, or even contradicts it. I never see this in CS papers. I've seen it regularly whilst reading epi papers. Or papers where the key claim in the abstract is just fraudulent, like the Flaxman claims about the efficacy of lockdowns which just assumed its own conclusions in the construction of the model, and relied on assigning Sweden a ludicrously huge country-specific fudge factor in the model (4000x). Right, and the fact that this was done wasn't mentioned anywhere in the paper nor supplementary materials ... you had to read the code to find it (at least the code was open that time!).

You can tut and say well that shouldn't have happened, but of course there will be people who are tempted to dress up their chosen conclusion in the clothes of science. The question is really what mechanisms are responsible for detecting and preventing a fall in standards. But in science the only such mechanism is peer review and journals, which are hardly effective. Everyone is a part of the same system with the same incentives and there are no penalties for incorrect work, so bad papers are getting published in Nature and Science all the time, especially when aligned with the prevailing ideology of these institutions. University administrators are responsible in theory, or maybe granting bodies, but same problem: none of them have any stake in output quality. Ultimately to fix these problems you need to tie the rewards in academia to the correctness of results, but academia isn't culturally anywhere near ready to even think about that. Academic freedom implies the freedom to be wrong your entire career, of course.

A friend of mine who once lived in China quipped that maybe some low-level tech from the lab was selling animals from the lab at the wet market. Not likely, but he says given what he saw in China it would not surprise him much.

The famous lab animal selling was "A top academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering earned 10.17 million yuan ($1.46 million) by illegally selling off lab animals" rather than a low level tech. Pigs though. Still it suggests standards may be a bit variable.

> The question of how it got to Wuhan all the way from Southern China remains unanswered.

There are coronavirus-carrying bats in Hubei province.

Except this is not just a USA story. The reality is that China is shutting down any research into the origins of the virus - at least by doctors not loyal to the government. They are arresting journalists who don’t tell the story they want to tell.

In the vacuum of information, it’s fair to point out that the market not being the source means something else was - and - there was a lab that had the closest variant to the virus within the same city.

If smallpox broke out in Atlanta, so you think anyone on earth wouldn’t immediately come to the conclusion that the CDC had a accident with their BSl? And there are 14 in the USA. Just one in China - and it’s Wuhan.

Let’s not act like this is a story about American regulation or deregulation.

Never mind that the author is dealing with a country that is committing genocide right now simply because some Muslims believe in Allah and not the state.

If I've understood it correctly, China isn't persecuting Muslims, but Uyghurs, and their main justification for it is the East Turkestan independence movement. There are plenty of Muslims in other parts of China living normal lives.

There are plenty of Uyghurs living normal lives. Don't forget that even the highest estimates of a million targeted amount to maybe 10% of the total population. There are also plenty of ethnic Kazakh and Kyrgyz Muslims among the eyewitnesses interviewed in Western media, as well as restrictions on religious freedom all over the country: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-uighur-m... Of course having their mosque closed for illegal religious activity and eating halal food that says 清真 instead of حلال on the packaging still leaves people with what might be considered a "normal life", even though it is different from the normal life they knew before.

The CCP is also discriminating against Uyghur marriages. That’s impacting people outside of internment camps. A policy which removes some pressure from the excess male births from the rest of the country and destroys an unwanted ethnic group. Combined with some forced sterilization and forced contraception and you get a “mild” form of genocide that destroys a people without producing mass graves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide

Chinese government statistics show that from 2015 to 2018, birth rates in the mostly Uyghur regions of Hotan and Kashgar plunged by more than 60%.

> The CCP is also discriminating against Uyghur marriages.

I assume you're referring to this part of your link:

> In March 2017, Salamet Memetimin, an ethnic Uyghur and the Communist Party Secretary for Chaka township's Bekchan village in Qira County, Hotan Prefecture, was relieved of her duties for taking her nikah marriage vows at her home. In interviews with Radio Free Asia in 2020, residents and officials of Shufu County (Kona Sheher), Kashgar Prefecture (Kashi) stated that it was no longer possible to perform traditional Uyghur nikah marriage rites in the county.

Such a policy against nikah marriages would also affect other Muslims, not just Uyghurs.

> Combined with some forced sterilization and forced contraception and you get a “mild” form of genocide that destroys a people without producing mass graves.

Similarly, forced sterilization has been part of government restrictions on reproduction for decades, and although the limit has been raised with the abandonment of the one-child policy, there's still a limit. So it doesn't just affect all non-Uyghur Muslims in China as well, but actually everyone. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/world/asia/after-one-chil...

First there is plenty of evidence on the marriage thing with the most well documented being marriage subsidies and propaganda, the Wikipedia link was for context and the quote. Anyway, a 60% drop in births isn’t part of a wider national trend, this is extremely targeted.

The 60% drop is not part of a wider national trend only because national birth rates started dropping when the government first implemented birth control policies in the 1960s: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.CBRT.IN?view=cha... Xinjiang is slightly lagging behind, but it's very much the same policies in play.

In the New York Times article I linked above, it is mentioned that "From 1980 to 2014, according to official statistics, 324 million Chinese women were fitted with IUDs. And 107 million underwent tubal ligations or, as is commonly said, got their “tubes tied.”" Most of those cannot have been Uyghur women, since those figures vastly exceed the total Uyghur population.

So other parts of China simply suffered their sterilization campaigns much earlier. Birth rates in Xinjiang only dropped slightly from 17.57 per thousand in 2000 to 15.88 in 2017, but then to 10.69 in 2018 and further to 8.14 in 2019: https://data.stats.gov.cn/easyquery.htm?cn=E0103&zb=A0302&re... , which is a fast drop; but in Beijing, the maximum birth rate over the past 20 years was 9.32 in 2016, and their 2019 birth rate was still below Xinjiang's at 8.12: https://data.stats.gov.cn/easyquery.htm?cn=E0103&zb=A0302&re...

National birth rates where 13 in 2016 vs 9.3 in Beijing demonstrating it’s a poor fit for national trends. It’s an interesting spin attempt, but clearly fails even when looking at the data you provided.

In terms of IUD rates. 324 million IUD’s over 34 years vs a current population of 1.4 billion don’t on their own get 60% drop in birth rates. Further, it isn’t like Xinjinang was completely outside of the national trends and suddenly caught up, this is clearly deliberate genocide based on openly available data.

> National birth rates where 13 in 2016 vs 9.3 in Beijing demonstrating it’s a poor fit for national trends.

Yes, it's harder to avoid the government's wrath if you live right under their eyes in the capital, so national policies are more likely to be enforced in Beijing than elsewhere.

> In terms of IUD rates. 324 million IUD’s over 34 years vs a current population of 1.4 billion don’t on their own get 60% drop in birth rates.

Did you do the math on that? 1.4 billion population total corresponds to roughly 700 million women; adding 324 million IUDs and 107 million tubal ligations amounts to 431 million sterilizations, about 62% of all Chinese women.

Of course it's not just the sterilizations that cause a drop in birth rates, but also having to pay a fine per "superfluous" child, not qualifying for government benefits, the rising cost of living making raising a child more expensive etc. It's no wonder that many women would choose to have no or fewer children under these circumstances, especially if they know other women who can tell them exactly what it's like.

> Further, it isn’t like Xinjinang was completely outside of the national trends and suddenly caught up,

I do think they were outside national trends in terms of percentage of women sterilized and "caught up" by sterilizing women en masse even when they gave birth years ago; while those sterilizations would have happened routinely after childbirth in Beijing.

I guess we'll see whether birth rates in Xinjiang will continue to drop below even the level of Beijing, stagnate at the current level or bounce back slightly once the figures for 2020 are published (but then there's the pandemic as a confounder...)

Hey, if you want to say the Chinese government are corrupt, genocidal assholes, I'm with you.

What they want to cover up is any hint of fault. They want everyone to stay in line and question nothing, regardless of anything else.

I just don't think there's any real evidence of this being a man made pandemic either.

SARS has leaked from Chinese labs multiple times. And the only lab in the world specializing in coronaviruses was ~1000 ft away from the first cases. The leaked US diplomatic cables urge the US to help China with this very lab because biosecurity there was so concerning to visiting scientists. It's also the only BSL4 lab in China. In addition the head of that lab has published numerous papers about generic engineering of coronaviruses. That lab also discovered the closest ancestor of COVID.

COVID is also interestingly contagious among minks and ferrets, common lab animals used for serial passage. It's also undergone remarkably little generic drift since the pandemic began. Since the moment it was released it was already human adapted. Extremely suspicious for a brand new virus.

For SARS, MERS, etc we were able to find a 99.9% identical virus in nature. The closest one we have to COVID is 96%, quite distant genetically.

The last time we couldn't find the virus in nature was the 1976 flu pandemic. 20 years later scientists began admitting that it was triggered by a lab leak. When genetic engineering became advanced enough it was obvious that the strain was identical to a pandemic flu strain from the 50's.

In reality, the scientist new from the beginning that the 1976 pandemic was a lab leak but the information was thoroughly suppressed so that the soviet union would cooperate with monitoring. This is exactly what happened with China early in the pandemic. Nobody wanted to criticize people being welded into their homes because China was providing data on the virus. I am completely convinced that this is why the lab leak hypothesis for COVID is being "debunked"

To me there is overwhelming evidence that COVID is a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. IMO the only reason everybody is denying it is the severe political repercussions for China essentially killing more people than WWII. US researchers are co-authors on many of the institutes papers on coronavirus genetic manipulation. The US was funding some of their research, presumably because gain of function research is banned in the states.

Are you referring to the 1976 or 1977 influenza? There is evidence of a lab leak or other human origin for the 1977 strain but the original source was never definitively identified.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/

https://mbio.asm.org/content/6/4/e01013-15.full

Sorry 1977 you are correct

> SARS has leaked from Chinese labs multiple times. And the only lab in the world specializing in coronaviruses was ~1000 ft away from the first cases. The leaked US diplomatic cables urge the US to help China with this very lab because biosecurity there was so concerning to visiting scientists. It's also the only BSL4 lab in China. In addition the head of that lab has published numerous papers about generic engineering of coronaviruses. That lab also discovered the closest ancestor of COVID.

Can you kindly cite literally every sentence of this? I googled, but my Google-fu is weak.

The virologist "bat lady" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi_Zhengli

SARS leaks https://www.the-scientist.com/news-analysis/sars-escaped-bei...

Leaked cables https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/state-depar...

US coronavirus research collaboration https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02473-4

Wuhan Institute of Virology employees are cited in a huge number of Coronavirus research papers. Some research may be done elsewhere but AFAIK it's the only lab in the world doing lots of work with SARS and relatives. The "batwoman" researcher who works at WIV is somewhat famous for gathering thousands of bat viruses from caves across China.

In addition RATg13, the closest related virus to COVID, wasn't published by the lab until after the pandemic outbreak. Even though the sample was supposedly collected years ago. If they're sitting on random unpublished coronavirus genomes doesn't it seem likely that COVID was one of these?

Theres too many coincidences for me. I would bet money that it's a lab leak

Use DuckDuckGo if you ever want to search for something controversial since they don't filter their results like Google.

> In fact, this is the seventh time we've seen Betacoronavirus cross from bats.

This is also not the first time a lab leak caused an outbreak, the 2004 SARS outbreak was caused by a lab leak [1]

[1]: https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-...

The main point here is that the lab escape hypothesis has been hitherto dismissed out of hand when it ought not to be.

I agree that the natural zoonotic contamination hypothesis is more plausible to begin with, but since it has not been confirmed (as in: no natural reservoir has been identified), the less plausible but nonetheless not implausible lab escape hypothesis should still be on the table.

The President of the United States is on record as saying it came from a lab.

I’m not sure how that translates to “dismissed out of hand”.

Dismissed by the intelligentsia, like everything he says. Usually they are right to do so, but occasionally I think there is a touch of "orange man bad" syndrome.

I treat Trump's grunts like the output of a Markov chain random text generator and don't consider them official signifiers either for or against anything. He blathers and lies and then contradicts himself with different lies an hour later. He's a classic bullshitter.

The President says a lot of things...

Yes but the jumps typically flame out. This virus has an extremely well adapted human furin site well outside of typical Bat Corona virus. This is more in line with gain of function research.

There are thousands of wet markets in China, but very few virus labs. Out of all the wet markets in China, the virus just happened to originate at the one right next to the virus lab? That alone is enough evidence to make the lab escape theory the most likely origin. Though it's far from certain.

The virus likely didn't originate at the wildlife market, because many of the early patients had no connection to it.

There is a building of the Wuhan CDC (not the WIV) near the wildlife market, but the Wuhan CDC has numerous buildings and this particular one doesn't seem to be implicated in coronavirus research.

2 good points. Being in the same city as the virus lab is a lot less suspicious than being across the street.

Regardless of the lab theory it's pretty clear that the wet market was simply the first known super spreader location and not necessarily the origin given how a third of the first known patients had no connection to the wet market.

There are thousands of wet markets in China, but very few provincial capital cities (Wuhan is one). Out of all the wet markets in China, the virus just happened to originate at the one next to the provincial administrative office? That alone is enough evidence to make the provincial administrative office the most likely origin of the virus, right?

If they handle coronaviruses in the provincial administrative office, then yes. Do they?

Maybe they do secretly handle coronaviruses in the provincial administrative office; they can't prove they don't anyways.

This isn't a logical comparison.

The lab specifically collected live bat coronaviruses for testing. The provincial administrative office did not.

Snopes.com points out that the market wasn't "right next to the virus lab."

It was in fact a full seven miles away.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/01/covid-19-bioweapon/

Back in Feb 2020, a rumor circulating on Chinese social media said that there was another lab in the city near the market, which was a competitor to the lab of Wuhan Institute of Virology that is most widely mentioned, under the umbrella of a university of agriculture/forestry/geology (I don't remember the exact details).

I am not sure about the validity of the rumor, though.

A couple of examples of Snopes intellectual dishonesty.

Mixture https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-smash-phon...

Mixture https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/harris-believe-biden-accus...

>We (humans) had wet markets filled with animals, including the very bats that carry the base virus.

That's not in evidence.

>Bats were initially suggested to be the source of the virus, although it remains unclear if bats were sold there (Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market).

>Despite the role that the market played in the pandemic, it is yet unclear whether the novel coronavirus outbreak started in the market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huanan_Seafood_Wholesale_Marke...

Can you explain how this virus became (instantly) better adapted to humans than it is to bats?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.06199

Looks like it didn't become better adapted. Already was. In lots of species, it's less well adapted. This is a non-story.

There is circumstantial evidence to indicate that the OC43 beta coronavirus crossed from animals in 1889 and killed about a million people worldwide. It can still be fatal to elderly or immunocompromised patients. The only reason it doesn't kill many people today is that most of us are infected as children and build up a level of immunity, so subsequent reinfections tend to have mild symptoms. Just like SARS-CoV-2.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/

Maybe that's how SARS-CoV-2 will end up - people will get it as kids and become immunized.

Perhaps paradoxically the fact that other betacoronaviruses have made the jump to humans naturally, would increase the probability that this was a lab accident: scientists want to study the most likely candidates for a pandemic.

> We (humans) had wet markets filled with animals, including the very bats that carry the base virus.

No wet markets here where I am ... so maybe speak for yourself.

So your country doesn't have stores or markets that carry live fish or display meat on a counter?

Look up the definition of what a wet market is. for example, most markets in the UK can be classed as wet, as well as many large supermarkets with a meat or fish counter

You have no questions about the validity of data coming out of China?

The fact that there is China's first biosaftey level 4 lab in the same town where the virus originated doesn't arouse any suspicion whatsoever?