It's not an unreasonable question. But my own guess? Selection bias applies.
Viruses grow by the millions, billions, and mutations occur frequently. This virus's ancestor might have hopped around civets for months. Then, a few random mutations on one got lucky and made it really good at infecting humans. That's when it made the leap. We don't see the billions of attempts and mutations that sucked at infecting humans. We see the one that did.
Now, my own bias is that my honours thesis was on evolutionary algorithms and I spent a lot of time being amazed at how well random mutations can lead to optimal answers.
Viruses grow by the millions, billions, and mutations occur frequently. This virus's ancestor might have hopped around civets for months. Then, a few random mutations on one got lucky and made it really good at infecting humans. That's when it made the leap. We don't see the billions of attempts and mutations that sucked at infecting humans. We see the one that did.
Now, my own bias is that my honours thesis was on evolutionary algorithms and I spent a lot of time being amazed at how well random mutations can lead to optimal answers.