Question:"Tell me, if these wet markets have been going for centuries, why have we never seen a pandemic this this originate from one before? "
An answer: "The "why didn't this happen before" argument seems weird -- it *has* happened before, many, many times, that a virus has passed from animals to humans. Examples include, but are by no means limited to, SARS, MERS, bird flu, swine flu, Ebola, HIV, and many others."
jim360, your own zenodo Link states:
"Although no bat reservoir nor intermediate animal host for SARS-CoV-2 has been identified to date, initial cross-species transmission events are very likely to go undetected. Most SARS-CoV-2 index case infections are unlikely to have resulted in sustained onward transmission20and only a very small subset of spillover events from animals to humans result in major outbreaks. Indeed, the animal origins of many well-known human pathogens, including Ebola virus, Hepatitis C virus, poliovirus, and the coronaviruses HCoV-HKU1 and HCoV-NL63, are yet to be identified,This document is copyright of the authors. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.while it took over a decade to discover bat viruses with >95% similarity to SARS-CoV and able to use hACE-2 as a receptor21."
LadyCG, I have NO idea whether it came from the wet market, those who say they do are wrong, unless they can provide decisive evidence, which NO-ONE has to date , but it is also NOT impossible.( i.e. pure chance or as jim360 said, bad luck. )
How non-experts (hello Gromit) can say whether highly esoteric, cutting edge, complex technology like gene cutting/splicing can be 'detectived', when experts in these complex technologies disagree(= don't know) is bizarre.
18 months on and the Mail Link cannot even get the distance of the Wuhan Institute of Virology from the wet market: "somehow the virus escaped and spread via the Huanan market which was just two miles from the institute."
--- no, it is just under 9 miles away as the roads go, not as the birds or drones fly; which itself is another possible red herring.
And if it did come from a Lab, why would it have to be that Lab ?
Case untried, insufficient evidence... we might never get to the bottom of this.