My reaction is that the lab should be suspected. They've been doing research on SARS-like viruses from bats for years now. What are the odds that it would break out in the same city, of all the cities in the world? Is the seafood market a scapegoat?
Tons of people have been doing work on SARS-like viruses from bats for years now. That's what happens when you go from "No one gets infected by cornaviruses" to...SARS.
Accidental releases almost always involve people with direct links to the lab in question first. That's a really obvious epidemiological link.
"A coronavirus emerged in China and got detected quickly because of solid medical infrastructure" is a way more parsimonious explanation than "Accidental release from a BSL-4 lab."
For emerging infectious diseases, Wuhan is perfectly functional, and the Chinese have the necessary resources. Motorbikes with samples aren't getting stuck as roads turn into mud during the rainy season.
How many people commenting on here have actually worked in a lab doing this kind of research? or any lab for that matter? From experience, i will say that researchers are humans too and make mistakes. Things get dropped, spilled, mislablled all the time. Mistakes may be compounded by people collaborating - i.e. researcher A makes mistake at earlier stage in the protocol and researcher B does everything correct but is building on top of that error. Also, people share work spaces where some people are more careful than others.
In this kind of argument odds are just a way of making intuition sound objective. Based on one person's experience it may be obvious that accidental release from labs can happen. To another person this will seem more far fetched.
So which side of the argument should provide evidence? Why is the parents suspicion any less valid than your lack of suspicion? These kind of questions are particularly difficult when secretive government institutions are involved.
If patient zero really came from Wuhan, the law of large numbers would put you at odds around 6/100 (60 million people in Wuhan in the 1 billion people region)
That was the point of picking Atlanta - there's a very high concentration of infectious disease experts with close connections to the major public health agency.