[woooooo]

I've also been to Wuhan and it's a big town with more than one place to buy food.

It's absolutely possible that the epicenter wet market was on a particular lab worker's way home and that's how the spread started. Also possible that someone who lived in the countryside, contracted it from an animal, and went to Wuhan to visit family for spring festival.

That biomarker stuff is interesting and I'll have to take the biologists' word for it. If it looks and quacks like a bio weapon, that is evidence. "Some people generally study viruses across town" is a lot weaker.. it's like automatically blaming Columbia University for an infection in Brooklyn because they have bio labs.

[eggy]

I believe it was an accidental leak of a modified coronavirus in order to study possible epidemiology even if from the lab, and not a bio weapon. Spring Festival? If it started in Oct-Dec 2019, it would be around Golden Week. Chinese Spring Festival 2020 was January 25.

Yes there are a lot of places to buy food, but wet markets are a special type of place to buy food. The wet market in question is right across the river from the WIV, which coincidentally(?) studies coronaviruses and was conducting studies prior to the outbreak.

From a 7 June 2021 paper [1]:

Here we document 47,381 individuals from 38 species, including 31 protected species sold between May 2017 and November 2019 in Wuhan’s markets. We note that no pangolins (or bats) were traded, supporting reformed opinion that pangolins were not likely the spillover host at the source of the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

The other human coronaviruses came from bats mainly. The WIV had bats from a location known to have coronaviruses. Scientists now wear masks when bat hunting in caves, but before COVID-19 they typically did not (I'll dig up the reference later). No bats were sold at the Wuhan wet market. The US/NIH/Fauci and other world players have a stake in the WIV of some sort. They were doing research on coronaviruses, and they were manipulating the virus. Documents before 2019 asking for approval to conduct such research are in the public record.

[woooooo]

As far as I know, "wet market" just means a place you can buy live food. It's the default rather than the exception outside of tier 1 cities for most of the third world, live animals are self-preserving and don't require refrigeration. You can walk past several "wet markets" on a single block.

[eggy]

I meant they were special compared to Western market models, but there are usually large, famous ones in any Chinese city compared to any small, limited 'wet market'. In Macau it was Hung Kai Sie (Red Market), which takes up an entire block or more.