alt Hacker News> when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection
If the alternative hypothesis is that the events are independent, yes. But it is somewhat more common to have labs studying viruses in regions where there are virus reservoirs. So the events "lab studying viruses" and "virus outbreak in local area" are not independent, as both are more likely in regions with viral reservoirs, and in particular, in dense urban areas thereof. A coincidence is not as extraordinary as it may seem.
Thing is, it is not possible to know at this point, as long as the virus does not seem to be bioengineered, whether it was a lab accident while studying animal samples or an outbreak starting in the market.
Nobody expected natural zoonotic spillover near Wuhan, and Dr. Shi's lab was not situated with that in mind. In her own words:
> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210727042832/https://www.scien...
The virus doesn't seem to have been engineered from any previously known sarbecovirus, but the WIV had the largest collection of novel sarbecoviruses collected from nature in the world, and had proposed in DEFUSE to engineer them in collaboration with Dr. Baric at UNC. DARPA rejected that proposal, in part for safety reasons, but the WIV was technically capable of doing the work alone.
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...