| >It's so obvious that an appeal to common sense is all that's necessary. How many markets do you think are in China? 100,000? 1,000,000? This is why "common sense" is very often wrong and we have to refer to data instead. You're making assumptions that are very wrong. The wet market was over 50,000 square metres in size and one of the largest in China. The idea that there are hundreds or millions of these things is completely backwards. The conditions were unsanitary, animals were slaughtered on site, and large numbers of wild animals were sold. This is exactly the sort of place you'd expect a zoonotic spillover event to occur. It was flagged beforehand as a danger site. It's not impossible that it could have been a lab leak, but consider that this market had hundreds of thousands of animals being kept, slaughtered and sold, in unsanitary conditions, shitting and pissing on each other, bleeding everywhere and biting humans and each other. Now compare that to a secure biolab holding a small number of samples whilst following biosecure protocols. Even if they weren't perfect, which environment provides the best chance of a spillover event? |
And sure, the wuhan market is a great place for a zoonotic spillover to occur, but any wet market would be, so the wuhan market in particular isn't the exact place you would expect. In fact I would expect it to occur at a market much closer to where the most similar viruses were found.
However, since the wuhan market is the enormous unsanitary market near the novel coronavirus lab, it is the exact place I would expect the first super spreader event to occur following a leak at that lab.