And since there are people out there who still erroneously believe that the pandemic started from a lab leak, maybe the latest investigation and paper on this will convince you otherwise. There was an excellent blog entry by Derek Lowe today in Science Translational Medicine, discussing the exhaustively thorough investigation of the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak by a multidisciplinary, international team of top scientists; the blog and the actual paper are linked below. Spoiler alert: the investigation concludes with what most scientists (including yours truly) have always thought would be the conclusion, i.e., that zoonotic transmission from wild animals in the Huanan wet market in Wuhan to humans is, by far, the most plausible origin of the pandemic - not any lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as some seem to think might be the case. An excerpt from the study is in italics, below.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/origins-pandemic
https://zenodo.org/record/6299600#.Yh8SQ-jMJ3j
The investigation painstakingly outlined locations of all of the earliest known infections and these were highly clustered around the wet market (not the lab, 9 miles away), plus the Chinese CDC had previously published environmental monitoring results from that time showing positive virus results from wet market animal stalls. Lowe acknowledges that the Chinese government has not been helpful on this and generally can't be trusted, but that the data this team assembled is fairly overwhelming in establishing the wet market as the source - and noted that while the Chinese government has said that wildlife was generally not in that wet market, several of the team's researchers had actually seen all of these illegal animals in that exact wet market in the months before the pandemic.
In this study, we use epidemiological, genomic, commercial, photographic, location, social mobility and survey data – from a range of sources – to investigate the hypothesis that the COVID-19 epidemic in Wuhan began at the Huanan market. We conclude that the Huanan market was indeed the epicenter of COVID-19 emergence. We demonstrate that December 2019 COVID-19 cases were geographically distributed unexpectedly near to, and centered on, the Huanan market, irrespective of whether or not they worked at, had visited, or were knowingly linked to someone who had visited this market in late 2019. Furthermore, of those cases epidemiologically linked to the market, the overwhelming majority were specifically linked to the western section of the Huanan market, where most of the live-mammal vendors were located. Validating this spatial link between live animals and human COVID-19 cases, we show that positive environmental samples distinctly associated with animals clustered within a small area of the Huanan market where live mammal sales were most concentrated.
