> Over time, three basic issues emerged with this theory. No one has been able to identify: > A specific infected animal at the South China Seafood Market Won

> Over time, three basic issues emerged with this theory. No one has been able to identify: > A specific infected animal at the South China Seafood Market Won't ever happen now because they sterilized the market as a containment action almost immediately. With SARS-CoV-1 the virus wasn't as virulent and researchers were able to study it at the market where the pandemic originated. By acting fast to try to contain it, they erased any evidence of it. > An intermediate reservoir population in Hubei who were infected with a close relative of SARS-CoV-2 (pangolins were initially suspected but never confirmed) Any animal now observed to have SARS-CoV-2 in mainland China will have a high probability that humans gave the virus to it. That makes it difficult to track down which species was the intermediate animal without a time machine. > And that is the Covid-19 origin puzzle in a nutshell: how did a bat virus from a cave in Yunnan end up hundreds of miles away in Wuhan? Same problem with SARS-CoV-1 where the closest related bat virus is WIV1 which was isolated in 2013 (ten years after that outbreak) from bats in Hubei but which wound up causing an outbreak in wet markets about 700 miles away in Guangdong. RaTG13 is also separated by several decades of evolution from SARS-Cov-2, you can't close that gap with any experiment in a lab without a massive serial passage experiment through many millions of animals. And the really problematic issue for the lab leak theory is that it looks like Lineage A and B were separate spillover events of different variants.