I found this to be an extremely engaging read and compelling story.
TLDR; The likelihood of it being lab related is high. The likelihood of it being directly malicious low.
My Take form reading it: The lab in question needed to collect bats for research. A person who collected the bats did so with insufficient safety and is likely patient 0.
And this sounds like a reasonable possibility to be explored. Accidents happen. Lapses in procedures happen.
The problem is that early on, and still in some circles, lab related equates to malicious bio-weapon and/or China purposely attempting to destroy the world. It's important to separate the two, and hopefully this is a cautionary tale for all labs to review their policies and procedures.
Well that's the problem with reducing every argument to absurd extremes.
It's part of why modern political discourse is fundamentally broken.
We counter discourse out of fear of what the extreme form of that accusation will be - not based on what the argument is actually saying.