By "two such viruses", I meant two novel, unpublished viruses. I don't think that requires any great conspiracy from the WIV, just the normal delays between sam

By "two such viruses", I meant two novel, unpublished viruses. I don't think that requires any great conspiracy from the WIV, just the normal delays between sampling, sequencing, and publishing. RaTG13 was sampled in 2013, but the full genome wasn't published until after the pandemic. And interesting odds. In your p = 24% case where it's natural spillover but a lab had seen the virus before people got sick, are you assuming that a researcher got infected with a naturally-evolved virus, whether directly from an animal on a sampling trip or from a culture in the lab? It's hard to see why they'd be concealing their prior knowledge of the virus otherwise. I'd personally bet maybe 20% lab-manipulated (by a DEFUSE-like path), 50% naturally-evolved but accidentally released by researchers, 30% true natural. I'm less sure that SARS-CoV-2 needed a non-bat animal host given BANAL-52's spike, though that leaves the question of how BANAL-52 got so closely-adapted to human ACE2 rather mysterious. (I wonder if SARS-CoV-2 but with the BANAL-52 spike would infect humanized mice? I guess that's exactly the kind of curiosity that might have started this pandemic...) As to the abundance of coronaviruses, I assume you're aware that the closest bat viruses have been collected far from Wuhan, and Dr. Shi herself didn't expect spillover in Wuhan: > We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province. https://web.archive.org/web/20201206204844/https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/Shi%20Zhengli%20Q%26A.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20201206204844/https://www.scien... SARS-1 emerged far from the bat caves too, but wildlife trafficking there was quickly identified as the likely conduit. I understand there's some debate as to whether civet cats (and not some other animal) were actually the proximal host for SARS-1, but that's still much stronger evidence of zoonosis than we have for SARS-CoV-2.