The most likely explanation is that one of the many widespread contacts between wild animals and humans in the area, likely at a wet market where wild animals were being sold as food, resulted in the virus jumping to humans.
SARS-CoV2 makes a poor bioweapon. You'd want something with a higher fatality (or severe morbidity) rate, both for effectiveness and also to limit it's geographic impact to the target country.
If it's not an engineered virus, the lab isn't a smoking gun. We have identified a very similar virus where bats are the reservoir species, and have identified a couple of very plausible routes by which it jumped to an intermediate wild animal that was transported to Wuhan for human consumption. If it's a wild virus, a lab escape seems less likely than the bushmeat hypothesis.
Both HIV and genital herpes are believed to have jumped to humans due to humans/homonids eating bushmeat. It's known to be a very dangerous thing to do, and it's known to be somewhat widespread in Wuhan.
Another possibility is that it is a virus engineered for research instead of direct use as a bioweapon, and it escaped. It's close enough to the wild bat virus that it's not obvious any engineering has been done.
In any case, we have a very simple and likely explanation that matches the official story.
It's comforting to believe we're in control and that simply being more stringent about lab safety will prevent this in the future. It's also politically convenient to blame foreigners (a favorite tactic of politicians everywhere for every occasion). Those two factors are why the lab escape rumours are so persistent.
The truth is that (1) we keep having dangerous contact with wild animals and farm animals and we will not have control until we cut down on these practices and (2) U.S. officials are largely to blame for the sad state of things in the U.S. Yes, the Chinese authorities should have been more open from the beginning and botched the opportunity to snuff it out early, but there are plenty of countries doing much better than the U.S.
Chinese authorities have tried very hard to cover up the origin of the outbreak. They have refused to publish the travel history or close contacts of the 55-year old first known patient. Furthermore, they have issued a gag order to all doctors about discussing the early stages of the outbreak https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2020/11/9833532bb925-chin...
Given the above, and how I have little faith the WHO will independently investigate the origins of the virus, it's very likely there will never be a concrete answer to how SARS-CoV-2 first spread to humans.
Interesting information. This is much better than the supporting information I had seen earlier (debunked story about HIV genes being spliced in, etc., etc.)
From what I've seen, the Chinese government has a very authoritarian mindset, and assume any hint of pushback is a sign of agitators. They tend to obstruct all investigation, even when they're not trying to hide anything specific. They try and get anything even mildly embarrassing out of the news as quickly as possible by stonewalling. I was in China 2 months before the melamine milk scandal broke, and even after the story broke, they tried to suppress information, even though I'm not aware that there were ever any government connections to the scandal. They just hated the embarrassment.
