I'm being very precise to avoid conflating lab leak and natural origin. There is a possibility those are the same thing. The virus could have been discovered in nature, brought to a lab, and leaked. I personally find this whole debate pretty boring, but it really worries me how frequently people mix this up. These two things are not exclusive. Argument in favor of one does not invalidate the other.

Re: a few specific points.

>The early cases are clustered around the market. I know the market and the lab are "close" on a global scale, but the details matter. They are 30km apart, about a 45 minute drive in traffic. Looks about as clear as John Snow's map of cholera outbreaks in London.

This is a bit of a trap. From that article:

>What about cases near the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which is more than 10 miles from the market? "There are no cases around the WIV," Worobey says. "If the outbreak did start in the lab, the bottom line is, it would be odd for it not to be spreading from there rather than from elsewhere."

The thing here to consider is that, lets say someone gets an accidental exposure. There's an incubation period, in which you are not shedding. Then you move around. Epidemiological data only shows where the first human-to-human transmission happened, not where the animal-human jump happened. Since you aren't immediately infectious after contracting the virus.

Re:

>"What is the chance that a big Chinese city like Wuhan would have a lab doing the kind of research that has come under suspicion? The answer is, the vast majority of the biggest cities in China have labs involved in such research. If COVID had emerged in, say, Beijing, there would be no fewer than four such labs facing suspicion."

SARS-CoV (the original) notoriously escaped a Beijing lab, not once, but twice.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7096887/

SARS-CoV also has the added advantage of being much easier to track, because the symptoms are so severe. With SARS-CoV-2, the symptoms are so mild, it's unlikely most people would think it was anything but a cold. Whether someone that worked at a virology institute would think that is a matter of some debate, but people have died from laboratory exposures before because they thought they had a benign illness, so it certainly has happened.

The problem is, people aren't having a genuine discussion. The communication goes something like this: someone says something about lab leak, and gets shut down by saying "the science says animal origin was more likely". The scientists are saying "the data says this was likely an animal to human transmission". But if you dig in on either of those points, things get shakier and shakier. The data that the virus evolved in animals, strong. The data that the virus evolved in any one specific species - less strong. The data that the virus evolved in an animal species that was in the wet market, even weaker. The data that the virus evolved in an animal species at the wet market, and then jumped from animals to humans at the wet market? Basically non-existent - circumstantial at best.

The only piece of data in that tree that would directly contradict the lab leak hypothesis is that last little bit of data. But it all gets wrapped up and packaged into the wordplay of "the data says the virus jumped to humans from animals", probably unintentionally by some, intentionally by others. The wet market hypothesis began because SARS had been found to transfer at a wet market in the past. But, that data has never been super convincing to begin with (this type of data never is, it was a full year after SARS-CoV 1 that antibodies were detected in civets), and there was no direct evidence of the wet market with SARS-CoV-2, so the hypothesis started out as pattern matching with an n=1 (SARS-CoV the original). Whereas, pattern matching with n=4 (or more) for lab leak works just as well.

Also frustrating is that not being able prove one hypothesis doesn't de facto validate the other. The hypotheses aren't even totally orthogonal! Only in very specific cases are they orthogonal, and those cases contain the weakest evidence of all the evidence in all categories.

The featured article is talking more about the conversation, and the nuances of the conversation, than it is the absolute truth of the matter. There will never be an answer, other than that "both are possible".

Re: the "spirit" of your point, if you will, which I interpret at something like "there are many more species than just humans, therefore most viruses evolve in other species and jump to humans", I certainly agree, but then we went and tipped the scales pretty badly by rounding up these viruses and putting them in close proximity to humans. And while we've been recording data, there have been far more lab leaks than there have been zoonotic events. So that argues that in the 20th and 21st centuries, we have, artificially, changed that calculation.