Official live update of spread of COVID19

[HappySkeptic]

Yes, the obvious is that there's a good chance it came from the lab. I do not lean one way or the other though. I don't know where it came from, but the investigation teams were compromised, and they only got what the lab wanted to give them. The WHO said right after this all started that an investigation of the lab was not needed.

It is obvious that the possibility exists.  It is NOT obvious that there is a "good chance".  That can only be determined by looking at the evidence, which so far supports the "little chance" conclusion. 

There are some voices pushing the opposite view, but they don't have evidence, and most of them aren't virologists or geneticists.  I saw a couple on Bill Maher last week that said "There is a 90% chance that the virus was created in a lab".  Where did they get the 90% number?  The people were biologists, not virologists, and they were likely getting the 90% number from online discussion groups. 

Their argument was also bad -- that the virus needed two functional mutations from the known in-the-wild forms to cause the pandemic.  Nature could create one, but two must mean it was man-made.  That is a completely false argument, unless one would expect us to have samples of all the natural "transitional forms" of the virus.  That is not something we would expect.

The other argument is that Chinese researchers have written papers about Coronavirus -- therefore it must be one of their creations.  That is a bad argument, but perfect for people who already are prone to conspiracy theories.