In a high k virus like Covid-19 you shouldn't really expect to be able to localize things that well. When the virus first entered France, for instance, there was a chain of individual transmission a half dozen links long before the first super-spreader event. I think a lot of the credibility of the natural origin story is that some farmer or miner in bumfuck Yunan might have been the first to be infected and he spread it to a trucker, who spread it to a wholesaler, who spread it to another trucker, who spread it to the first super-spreader who worked in the Wuhan Seafood market. That a scientist at the WIV might have given it to someone they were buying some meat from at the WIV who then turned into a super-spreader would also be pretty normal.

And yes, if there was a super-spreader event at the WIV of course you're going to be able to find viruses on lots of surfaces like the animal stalls.

That we knew what viruses the WIV was working on was why back in early 2020 I was very skeptical of the straightforward lab leak hypothesis. But articles like this one and books like Alina Chan's have convinced me that that isn't actually true, we wouldn't necessarily know about them until there were publishable results maybe years down the line and we do have evidence that the genomes of some viruses that they were working on were scrubbed from the records.

The original SARS in 2002 outbreak looked exactly like the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak.

SARS also began at a market that sold the same types of animals, in a city far away from Yunnan province.

SARS-CoV-2 comes from Yunnan or Southeast Asia (its closest known relative comes from Laos), but once it gets into farmed wild animals, it doesn't necessarily stay there. These animals are traded over long distances. Heck, Hong Kong had a population of hamsters with Delta a few months ago. The hamsters caught it in Europe, made it all the way to Hong Kong, and then infected a human (this is established based on the viral genetic sequences in the hamsters and the human).

> we wouldn't necessarily know about them until there were publishable results maybe years down the line

We knew plenty about the viruses the WIV had found before the pandemic. RaTG13 (until recently, the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, and the center of a lot of conspiracy theorizing which we can now say with 100% certainty is wrong) was uploaded to an NIH database years before the pandemic. The conspiracy theorists made a lot of stink about 8 viruses that Dr. Shi Zhengli had mentioned in public talks. Those viruses turned out to be too distantly related to SARS-CoV-2 to be of much interest.

Most of these viruses don't actually exist in live form at the WIV. The WIV only has three live SARS-related viruses, and each one of them is very well known to the outside scientific community. It takes a lot of effort to isolate live virus from bat fecal samples, and it's something the WIV heavily publicizes when it succeeds.

> we do have evidence that the genomes of some viruses that they were working on were scrubbed from the records.

I've followed this story and haven't seen any evidence of that whatsoever.

>On the other hand, it's public knowledge which viruses the WIV has been working with

They took down their database in September 2019.

First of all, I'm talking about the many publications, talks, and NIH-database submissions they made before the pandemic. The viruses that the WIV has worked with are publicly known, because like most scientists, the researchers at the WIV go to great lengths to publicize their work.

What you're talking about is a private, password-protected database that was used to share data with off-site collaborators. It was actually available until early 2020, when the WIV says they took it offline because of persistent attacks.