It is indeed unlikely, because it's much easier to detect an outbreak in a controlled setting like a lab before it infects a critical mass of the population. In

It is indeed unlikely, because it's much easier to detect an outbreak in a controlled setting like a lab before it infects a critical mass of the population. Indeed, lab leaks have happened before and were contained before it reached more than a handful of people. Much more likely that covid was rip-roaring uncontrolled through the Wuhan population well before the first official diagnosis, so it was already unstoppable. The real conspiracy is that China massively fucked up its handling of the outbreak because their government is generally incompetent and they don't want people prying too hard into any of it because it would be highly damaging to its world image for everyone to know just how incompetent they are. The labs have proven to be much better at this than some unelected cabal of autocratic government bureaucrats.