1. Direct-jump from bat population
2. Started in bats, came to humans through intermediate animal
3. Came from frozen food outside of China
4. Lab accident.
I used to think the lab accident theory was crazy, because it sounds like a science fiction movie. Not an impossible theory, just a crazy one.
But according to this article, despite a year of investigation, (1) is unlikely because we haven't found anyone that interacted with the nearest bat population hundred of miles away that didn't work in the virus lab in Wuhan and that caught the virus, (2) is unlikely because we would have found the intermediate animal by now, (3) is unlikely because the first case found was in China (and not somewhere else... if frozen food had the virus, the food would have had it before it was frozen, and someone else would have had it), and (4) is unlikely because a government famous for blocking information and is paranoid about how it is perceived domestically and internationally says "No, trust us on this one."
At some point, crazy theories become the most likely. Hopefully I'm wrong though, and they find an explanation that isn't "lab accident." It seems like we should be studying viruses and sharing that information with each other, and accidents like this will make it more likely that such research doesn't happen.
2) is also likely, for some viruses it took years and years, sometimes even more than a decade to find the actual intermediate animal.
4) is unlikely because further analysis cannot produce a likely scenario. If the virus was from an animal source known to the lab, we would know already, and if it was due to a gain-of-function experiment, it would be quite unlikely for the virus to take so much time to adapt to humans (it still hasn't fully done so), and there is still a lot of function to be gained. Besides, there is no obvious marker for genetic engineering (the furin cleavage sites are perfectly well described by both 1 and 2), and the fact the virus does not seem to be at a local optima yet indicates that it's probably not the result of engineering by repeated selection.
Researchers at the same lab published a study in 2017 where they tested the infectivity of 8 artificial coronaviruses (having been edited with 8 different spike proteins) on primate and human cell lines [2].
[1] https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/1197631383470034951?s...
[2] https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j... "Rescue of bat SARSr-CoVs and virus infectivity experiments"
If it did come from this research, which is being done openly with the help of many international collaborators, I don't understand how this could have happened without the virus being known to many more people, especially given the amount of time that passed from the first human infection to detection (which was enough for it even reach Europe!). It would be very surprising for no one else to know about it whereas normally such results are shared quite rapidly.
This is why the very person you quoted, and other people that were involved in such research that live outside of China, find the theory of a lab escape from this kind of research exceedingly unlikely.
The WIV simply doesn't hide samples for long enough for this to be a likely scenario.
By the way, it's estimated there's multiple hundred infections by novel coronavirus pathogens in China every year. So why would the much lower number of viral escapes be considered beyond it when we have the additional constrait of the sample not having been shared with anyone, whereas normally this is done?
4-6 weeks is lower than what we've seen abroad - in Italy between the likely patient zero in September 2019 and the first official case in late february, 5 months had gone.