It doesn’t explain why we have cases far from Wuhan before having cases there. The disease seems to have been imported there by a traveler who died later (that’s the contract tracing part, because the Barcelona sewer is even more puzzling)

I don’t think the provenance or chronology of those cases outside Wuhan is especially robust.

> a lot of holes in the fully zoonotic explanations.

This part just isn't true. We have a close relative on the same continent. That's almost as good as you ever get. There is nothing difficult to explain about a conventional evolution here, nothing at all.

There's also a related theory where one of the bat researchers got sick from a bat virus and brought it back to Wuhan. Most of this rests on the relative probabilities of events.

The "same continent" is 1,000 miles away and far away from the allegedly intermediate pangolins. With it being this widespread, it's weird that we can't find the animal reservoir and it's significantly diverged ... and adapted to humans ... from the bat coronavirus relative.

Sure, there's no good reason to stop considering the zoonotic explanation. If we suddenly find the missing links in the evolutionary record and whatnot, then things will change and people will consider that evidence more likely.

But right now, the balance of the evidence is tipping away from that. It could tip back, but that'll require new evidence for a zoonotic explanation and there just hasn't been any that I've seen recently, just the same old things we've already accounted for.

Given that china needs a smaller population and Japan and the EU need to maintain a dwindling one, the motivations are there. But china somehow seems to have kept cases insanely low, so that doesn't really hold. People have suggested the Chinese death toll is actually much higher but I've read no real evidence of that. Is it also possible living close enough to the zoonotic origin some level of immunity to similar viruses became common there?

China doesn't need a smaller population, it's actively trying to increase birth rates after 35 years of the One Child Policy caused a demographic catastrophe. The population projects are for a declining to below 1 billion people (potentially as low as 700 million by 2100)

The evidence of deaths in Wuhan being 10 times officially reported numbers (of 4,000) is very strong, based on analysis of crematoriums. The same is actually true of India too (which fared much worse than China).

> People have suggested the Chinese death toll is actually much higher but I've read no real evidence of that

Even if the chinese death toll was 10x or 100x reported (40k or 400k) it would be a tiny drop in the bucket of chinese population and I find it hard to believe that the death toll could be inflated 1000x or 10000x or more to any number which has any meaningful impact on the chinese population without that information leaking.

I'm sure the official figures are fabrications, but, I don't think they are THAT wrong.