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Baud_Olofsson t1_iz4j1ga wrote

Reply to comment by Puj_ in Scientists believe bats first transmitted SARS-CoV-2 to humans in December 2019, and while the virus has since evolved into several variants such as delta and omicron, a new study indicates the virus is still highly transmissible between mammals. by MistWeaver80

All the "evidence" for it being created in a lab is just a bunch of "doesn't it sound suspicious that...".

> I am desperately trying to not be conspiratorial, but here are the facts: A massive outbreak of a bat-based virus occurred in a large Chinese city far away from where any native bat populations could have harbored the virus.

The bats don't live in the city, and it doesn't really matter where they live, as they're caught and sold in a wet market, which is the perfect breeding ground for spillover events. Epidemiologists and virologists have warned China about this again and again, saying that it's only a matter of time before we have another SARS.

> There is also zero concrete evidence of the virus jumping from any species to another, all we got was a virus that was off-the-bat good at infecting humans, which is not normal when compared to literally every outbreak in human history.

What? There are plenty of viruses that jump straight from bat to human (rabies, Marburg, Ebola, Nipah). Then others that are great at killing us after going through a second species (SARS, MERS, Hendra). And again: wet markets. They couldn't be better designed to create the conditions for this to occur.
And I would like to remind you that it took 14 years to conclusively identify where SARS originated.

There is nothing special about SARS-CoV-2. Really, the only strange thing about COVID-19 is that it took this long for it to happen again.

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Puj_ t1_iz6o84b wrote

If the origin of the outbreak was the wet markets from infected imported bats, we would be able to detect earlier versions of the virus within market animals that should have spread around prior to it jumping to humans. To my knowledge, there is just no evidence of its history in the markets. Yes, viruses can jump species, but it takes time and we should be able to see its history. The lack of information and evidence here is apparently enough for a lot of virologists to doubt Covid's origins.

I don't think that virologists would be debating the origins of Covid as heavily as they are if the situation was really as clear and simple as you make it out to be. If you claim to have an understanding, you may be coming to that conclusion with valid points, but you are ignoring many factors and the arguments surrounding them. We don't know what happened.

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