I'm not a biologist or immunologist or any -ologist at all. But I have read a few very detailed articles about the components of SARS-COV-2, and there are two key elements to the virus that make it particularly targeted toward humans.

The thing is, we see these things in the wild first. Someone notices them, documents this weird variation in this one gene or protein or whatever, and later on someone finds it elsewhere, and suddenly there's a Patient 0 where it jumps from the original species and moves into its first human host.

The problem is, there is no evidence for these two elements in the wild.

And the only place they occur is in labs, when researchers are testing the limits of a specific biological function or element.

So yes, it is possible that the virus existed, whole and transmissible, in a wild bat or pangolin population somewhere, and a person got infected. Statistics say it can happen, probability says it is extremely unlikely, and sometimes these two lines cross.

But there is no Patient 0.

There's no mapping of the virus in the wild prior to the outbreak.

Personally, I've always been on the "wild variant, made jump to humans" side of this.

But after reading these articles recently, where biologists and virologists point out how entirely unlikely it is for these two things to change spontaneously in the wild, simultaneously, to create exactly what we see in humans today......... well.... I think I need to step across the line into the "escaped from a lab" rather than "wild variant" school of thought.