We cannot know for sure unless new information comes up, but the chances are that COVID was indeed a lab leak.
Before examining the clues, let’s clarify that “lab leak” doesn’t imply “created in a lab.” For example, a researcher might have traveled to a remote cave, collected a blood sample from a bat, went back to a virus lab, cultivated the virus from the bat’s infected blood, accidentally got infected by it, and then leaked it outside as they took a bus home without knowing they were infected.
The probabilistic argument for the lab leak hypothesis
Someone who believes lab leaks are rare might naturally be more inclined to believe that COVID is more likely to be of zoonotic origin than a lab leak. But lab leaks are very common. For example, there have been at least 450 incidents involving dangerous pathogens in the US alone in 2015-19. [1]
Moreover, how often did SARS (the 2002 virus) emerge from the wild? Once. And how many times did SARS escape from a virus lab? Four.[2]
Finally, consider that out of the hundreds of thousands of towns where the virus could have first appeared, it emerged precisely in one of the very few hosting a virus lab. What a coincidence!
Wuhan was a city at a high risk of lab leak. But what about the zoonotic risk (i.e., the risk of the virus naturally occurring there?) Well, Wuhan is so far from wild animal reservoirs that it was deemed a control (an area with a low risk of spillover) in some zoonosis papers written before 2020. (SOURCE: Source: “Serological Evidence of Bat SARS-Related Coronavirus Infection in Humans, China,” Wang, Li, Yang, et al, 2018..)
The most important question
What matters is not much whether COVID was a lab leak (though it probably was) but whether lab leaks pose a significant risk of originating another pandemic. And the answer is a resounding yes.
It’s crazy that despite all the pain and suffering inflicted by the recent pandemic, we didn’t do much to prevent virus labs from creating another one. Many of them still do dangerous research and still do it with inadequate safety protocols.
If we want to prevent future suffering, we must do something about it.