There's no question that the market was a major cluster, but that doesn't mean it was necessarily the point of introduction. SARS-CoV-2 must have been introduce

There's no question that the market was a major cluster, but that doesn't mean it was necessarily the point of introduction. SARS-CoV-2 must have been introduced to other continents at airports or seaports, but that's not where the first major clusters were found there. SARS-CoV-2 has relatively low IFR, and symptoms easily confused with other respiratory illnesses. This means that even with advance warning and good surveillance, many generations of cryptic spread are possible before someone gets sick enough to get tested. I've seen many fine-grained geographic arguments, both for and against unnatural origin, but would generally consider them to be noise given that early under-ascertainment. As to the environmental samples, virus was definitely present in the market, since infected humans were present. A few samples with raccoon dog DNA were found with a few SARS-CoV-2 reads; but almost all the SARS-CoV-2 in that market must have come from infected humans, and there's no evidence those reads didn't too. The correlation between SARS-CoV-2 presence and raccoon dog presence is negative, and that correlation is most positive for non-susceptible animal species; so I again think that's noise. This is from Jesse Bloom's analysis at https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.25.538336v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.25.538336v1