- 1st response to CoVID occurrence was certainly in Wuhan.
- The closest wild strain of CoVID happens in bats living thousand kilometres from Wuhan
- Wuhan had two institutes which, on record, did gain of function experiments on bat coronaviruses
- Beijing purposefully destroyed DNA evidence, and obliterated the team who first sequenced the CoVID genome
- Chinese authorities were scrambling, and suppressing reporting as early as November, seemingly with a very good idea what they are up to.
> The closest wild strain of CoVID happens in bats living thousand kilometres from Wuhan
That's weak evidence to claim that the lab hypothesis is more likely or even just to claim that the virus in humans originates from Wuhan.
Wuhan is a transport hub within China. In relation to dates it might be worth taking into account that hundreds of millions of Chinese travel around the country in early October and that the outbreak in Wuhan was detected in November/December. Coincidence? maybe, maybe not.
Additionally, we can also look at SARS (i.e. SARS-Cov-1, while Covid-19 is SARS-Cov-2): That epidemic started with an outbreak in Guangdong province in November 2002 (again, note the relative proximity with early October). Since then the origin of the virus has been traced to a colony of bats in Yunnan province [1] (perhaps also worth noting that this took 15 years). If you look at the map that is quite far away (1000+ km) and domestic transport networks have vastly improved since then.
Based on this, I don't see why the exact same scenario as the beginning of SARS would not be the more likely explanation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
Problem with that assertion is that knowing what we know today about the virus, this should have generated superspreader event situations along the travel path, which would have transported the virus to other locations in china.
Instead the opposite happened, and china tried to contain the virus to wuhan.
It's not obvious to me that superspreading events should have happened along the way.