If, unlike most of the other top commenters I see, you read the paper and its sibling[0], which isn't very long or difficult to understand, you'll find an inter

If, unlike most of the other top commenters I see, you read the paper and its sibling[0], which isn't very long or difficult to understand, you'll find an interesting and thoughtful analysis. They talk a lot about ascertainment (sampling) bias. They find the data points to the market even after they threw out the 1/3+ of the people who lived closest to it. And the cases not linked to the market lived closer to it than the cases that were: > One of the key findings of our study is that ‘unlinked’ early COVID-19 patients, those who neither worked at the market or knew someone who did, nor had recently visited the market, resided significantly closer to the market than patients with a direct link to the market. The observation that a substantial proportion of early cases had no known epidemiological link had previously been used as an argument against a Huanan market epicenter of the pandemic. However, this group of cases resided significantly closer to the market than those who worked there, indicating that they had been exposed to the virus at, or near, the Huanan market. For market workers, the exposure risk was their place of work not their residential locations, which were significantly further afield than those cases not formally linked to the market. This makes sense, but it's probably not something I'd have thought of myself. I also find figure 4[1] fascinating. Evidence points not just to the market, but to just a handful of stalls within it. The sibling study tracks two lineages in the early spread, both clustered around the market. The first study, citing this sibling, says: > This, along with the lineage A cases we report in close geographical proximity to the market in December, challenges the suggestion that the market was simply a superspreading event, which would be lineage-specific. Rather, it adds to the evidence presented here that lineage A, like lineage B, may have originated at the Huanan market then spread from this epicenter into the neighborhoods surrounding the market and then beyond. They conclude that they are likely the result of separate animal-to-human transmissions and that there were probably more jumps that quickly died off. This suggests that the virus was well-suited to infect humans before it jumped: > Successful transmission of both lineage A and B viruses after independent zoonotic events indicates that evolutionary adaptation within humans was not needed for SARS-CoV-2 to spread (49). We now know that SARS-CoV-2 can readily spread after reverse-zoonosis to Syrian hamsters (Mesocricetus auratus), American mink (Neovison vison), and white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), indicating its host generalist capacity (50–55). [0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8337 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8337 [1] https://www.science.org/cms/10.1126/science.abp8715/asset/86346dd9-84ab-43de-bfb8-fc8dd159756d/assets/images/large/science.abp8715-f4.jpg https://www.science.org/cms/10.1126/science.abp8715/asset/86...