[gus_massa]

Do you have a link for that? Last time I read a preprint claiming that, it was about a few (4?) parts that covid-19 has that are equal to parts of of other virus. But the matches were very short and some of them not even consecutive parts. It's very easy to get matches by chance comparing all the genome of covid-19 with all the genome of other virus, and if you allow holes in the matches it's even easier.

[Ekaros]

My understanding is that in general on average DNA across things is very similar. Specifics are different, but lot of material is shared even across species.

And then take fact that there is essentially 4 characters with million pairs to read surely some random data will collide.

[jtc331]

I found that unconvincing also. However the fact that the matching parts are in the furin cleavage site (which has never been seen in a coronavirus) did at least bump claim up to “this could plausibly be interesting”.