[jpeloquin]

Thanks for your reply. Not providing numerical estimates is fine with me, my opinion is that they're not productive anyway. It's like the Drake equation but worse, or trying to estimate the probability of divine creation vs. a natural origin for the universe. Too many unknowns, no ability to test counterfactuals. We are not even close to inventorying all relevant natural coronaviruses, so we don't have a good estimate for the number of "draws" to assume against the natural origin, and we don't do the routine monitoring that would allow a good estimate of probability for potentially pandemic pathogen → actual pandemic. So an armchair analyst ends up with a solid "maybe", with massive uncertainty intervals, for any explanation.

I completely agree that WIV's practices were dangerous and irresponsible, and that they are a plausible origin at all is a crushing condemnation. There's an old piece of advice: imagine that what you're doing ends up on the front page of the newspaper, and consider whether you would be proud or ashamed. If the latter, do something else. WIV clearly didn't follow that advice.

The facts in your post are all correct to my knowledge, I only quibble with the emphasis on infectiousness. The uniquely dangerous aspect of SARS-CoV-2 was its several-day period of transmissibility in the absence of symptoms, not its infectiousness, which for early strains was not that remarkable. Without asymptomatic transmission it would probably have been contained and quickly forgotten, like SARS-CoV-1. We need to adopt methods that will detect and contain viruses like SARS-CoV-2 so we're better prepared for when SARS-CoV-3 shows up.