Gain of function research is not engineering, they are often conflated for some reason. Gain of function is essentially artificial selection with bells and whis

Gain of function research is not engineering, they are often conflated for some reason. Gain of function is essentially artificial selection with bells and whistles. Such manipulation would leak some information into the virus. Already it seems like the virus has great difficulty spreading outdoors while great success spreading indoors. It may be a coincidence but evolution does encode environmental assumptions into the genes of an organism under selective pressure. It may turn out that the virus makes certain assumptions about its environment and if those assumptions are not compatible with open spaces in nature - where animals live, but relies on closed environments (certain humidity range, absent air currents, lack of any resistance to sunlight spectra) depending on how many of these assumptions are present a natural explanation for the virus may be all but ruled out.