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Regarding the various conspiracy theories that this thing was engineered or escaped from a lab:
See here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
The authors are an international group of scientists from San Diego, New Orleans, Edinburgh, and Sydney Australia. Analysis of several aspects of the genome and the interaction of the S-protein with ACE-2 show it is definitely not engineered by people. It has none of the features one would expect for an engineered virus. It is also quite unlikely it escaped from a research lab because features in the SARS-Cov-2 genome not found in SARS, MERS, or other human coronaviruses were very recently found (i.e. after the emergence of the Covid-19 disease) in SARS-CoV-like coronaviruses from pangolins. It is highly likely that it was zoonotic transmission (jumping from animals to people, something that is a quite common occurrence). There may have been a period of unrecognized transmission of SARS-Cov-2 in humans after the initial zoonotic event but then a mutation occurred and the virus acquired something called a polybasic cleavage site which markedly enhanced its infectivity and which through natural selection became the dominant form.
The article is very technical and not particularly easy to read for people not deep into genomics. That is just how these things are sometimes. It took me a long time to slog my way through this and this is my job. (I constantly had to go stop, look up something, and then resume reading).
Quoting from the summary:
SARS-CoV-2 is the seventh coronavirus known to infect humans; SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 can cause severe disease, whereas HKU1, NL63, OC43 and 229E are associated with mild symptoms[SUP]6[/SUP]. Here we review what can be deduced about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 from comparative analysis of genomic data. We offer a perspective on the notable features of the SARS-CoV-2 genome and discuss scenarios by which they could have arisen. Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.
Conspiracy theories sell ads and inflame emotions. Real science, not so much.
I think very few people would try to argue that it was a genetically engineered virus...but a more common argument is that the lab in Wuhan has indeed been studying not just the known strains of coronavirus- SARS and MERS, but many other strains that had been isolated directly from bats. There was a paper published towards the start of the emergence of this SARS-CoV2 pandemic that stated a 95% similarity to a particular strain of bat coronavirus, compared to aaround 80% to the 1st SARS. Although still highly unlikely that it could've escaped from these highly secure labs, due to the nature of what that lab is studying, it's not completely out of the question based on the information available.
The only logical argument that must be true to prove this to be completely impossible is if these labs simply have 0% chance for any agent to escape, which no one could ever know if that's true or not.