One of the things Wade demonstrates is that China was most likely doing research on CoV viruses in ordinary labs with nothing more than gloves and a white lab coat. The standard photo of Dr Shi is of her in a pressurised bubble suit but that's bsl4 and virologists don't like working in those conditions because it slows them down. So the research grants say the work will be done at much lower safety levels.
I guess at some point you enter a gray area where gross negligence and intentionality blur together. But the bioweapon idea shouldn't take hold because it's obviously wrong on its face: the virus has no characteristics that would make for a good weapon of any kind. For it to be intentional would require some kind of theory involving vaccinations but Europe's irrational shutdowns of their own vaccine programmes throws a wrench in the typical vaccine related conspiracy theories.
> the virus has no characteristics that would make for a good weapon of any kind.
Quite the contrary. The virus clearly favors authoritarian societies whose citizens will let their government weld them into their apartments. Just look at the death rate in China compared to the US and Europe. The only free societies that have come out unscathed are isolated islands (NZ, Taiwan).
That said, there is zero chance that the CPC had foreknowledge of this. They got very, very lucky.
This happens to be a virus which focuses most of its harm on elderly people who can be triaged out of care where resources are stretched in conflict situations, causes relatively few issues for combatants and spreads in an unpredictable manner well beyond the target population. Its clearly insufficient to undermine the actual fighting fitness of the societies which make no effort to stop its spread, but at the same time it goes round the world killing random noncombatants and likely gets back to your own population via neutral countries. Clearly far worse as a bioweapon than many naturally occurring viruses, especially when you apparently don't have an antidote and your potential adversaries can develop one faster
Eastern European countries are topping the death-per-capita charts (and the ones that don't are still topping excess-death charts).
African countries are doing "okay" because their ratio of people above age 65 is 2-3% rather than the 20% in Europe, and case numbers are low because they don't have the money to mass test.
Over time, I have seen these numbers level out. Of course, there's still some disparities in how countries manage the epidemic, but it seems more a case of when a country will be hit, not if. The countries that managed their first wave well (Poland, Czechia, Ukraine, Turkey) have been hit harder in the second wave than other countries.
It seems that Covid spread and fatality nicely correlates with how integrated and mobile a country's society is. Which shouldn't be that surprising, I guess. The only countries bucking this trend are in East-Asia (not just South Korea, but Japan, Singapore, Vietnam, etc), probably due to their experiences with earlier outbreaks.