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I generally agree with you, my guess is the virus was messed with and accidentally got out. However I don't feel comfortable ruling out alternative scenarios,

I generally agree with you, my guess is the virus was messed with and accidentally got out. However I don't feel comfortable ruling out alternative scenarios, such as: 1) The sample the lab received was from the 'third host' and not from a bat; e.g. a field researcher mailed the lab a slice of pangolin. 2) A guano miner or lab researcher received a massive viral dose and inadvertently became a one-man walking "GoF lab" > Assuming RaTG13 was indeed the source of COVID-19, the question of "how it got to Wuhan" is, I think, much less interesting than "how did it mutate into COVID-19" (and "why can't we find evidence of that process?"). 'Interesting' is subjective, but I think both questions are important. Particularly, the wisdom of locating a lab like this inside a city should probably be called into question. Whether the lab was doing GoF research on this virus prior to outbreak is certainly an important question; arguably the more important of the two. But unless we are dealing with 'zero-sum importance', that does not diminish the importance of figuring out why and how the virus was transported into a city.

Lazare 5y ago
> However I don't feel comfortable ruling out alternative scenarios I haven't suggested we should, not do I think that would be wise. We're in the uncomfortable position of having effectively no evidence in favour of any theory of COVID-19s origin, so we're reduced to trying to imagine which bits of missing evidence are the least likely to have been missed. It seems true that Wuhan is outside the flight range of the horseshoe bats living in the mine, and that a sample of RaTG13 was brought from the mine to the lab in Wuhan. If RaTG13 was a direct predecessor of COVID-19 (likely), and if the lab in Wuhan was the direct source of the initial infections in Wuhan (hard to estimate), then I think Occam's Razor suggests we have a good enough explanation for how RaTG13 got to Wuhan. It would be a remarkable coincidence if a sample of RaTG13 was in Wuhan to be studied, then RaTG13 independently mutated into an unknown COVID-19 precursor outside of Wuhan, then the precursor was separately brought to Wuhan to be studied, then the precursor leaked and became COVID-19! ...but as ever with this mess, I don't know of a reason we could rule it out. At most we can try and estimate the odds of the lab having a closer precursor than RaTG13 but not realising or, if they realised it, not admitting it, but I'm not sure how to even start evaluating that scenario, so...

Lazare 5y ago

> However I don't feel comfortable ruling out alternative scenarios I haven't suggested we should, not do I think that would be wise. We're in the uncomfortable position of having effectively no evidence in favour of any theory of COVID-19s origin, so we're reduced to trying to imagine which bits of missing evidence are the least likely to have been missed. It seems true that Wuhan is outside the flight range of the horseshoe bats living in the mine, and that a sample of RaTG13 was brought from the mine to the lab in Wuhan. If RaTG13 was a direct predecessor of COVID-19 (likely), and if the lab in Wuhan was the direct source of the initial infections in Wuhan (hard to estimate), then I think Occam's Razor suggests we have a good enough explanation for how RaTG13 got to Wuhan. It would be a remarkable coincidence if a sample of RaTG13 was in Wuhan to be studied, then RaTG13 independently mutated into an unknown COVID-19 precursor outside of Wuhan, then the precursor was separately brought to Wuhan to be studied, then the precursor leaked and became COVID-19! ...but as ever with this mess, I don't know of a reason we could rule it out. At most we can try and estimate the odds of the lab having a closer precursor than RaTG13 but not realising or, if they realised it, not admitting it, but I'm not sure how to even start evaluating that scenario, so...