Chinese wet markets

[Igel]

13. Much speaking / more correct.

The report cited still goes back to bats as the most likely reservoir; it's the intermediate source that's the problem and finding the exact match in a bat population or intermediate population.

Getting a 98% hit pretty much means "that's the general source", which is, as with other coronaviruses, bats.

The rest is defense of the indefensible for no valid reason.

What's hard to make the claim for "the first patient had no connect to the wet market" stick is the surprise, after the claims were made, that asymptomatic individuals are often more infectious than those with symptoms. So in checking for a connection to the wet market they have to investigate everybody that the purported patient zero came in contact with for the 3-10 days prior to showing symptoms and check them for antibodies. (And even then, if there is a "patient -1" given the antibody evidence based on samples collected prior to the COVID-19 spread and it's shown that this patient -1 has a connection to the wet market, that's still not sufficient evidence because there might be a patient -2 we'll never identify. At this point it's going to be unknowable because later covid-19 incidence would taint any conclusions drawn from samples collected after early January.)