I mean you’ve seen people with COVID by now; did they look much different?

The lab location and research done means there is a lot of potential incentive for the Chinese government, the lab and even researchers in the field to not have it be a lab leak...

They also have incentive for the origin not to be a live animal market that they very publicly had claimed to have already shut down.

It’s equally embarrassing either way, so the embarrassment proves nothing.

We'll never hear the true story thanks to geopolitics.

Frankly, the lab leak theory IMO is the most plausible. There are wet markets all over China and have been for....ever? I get that nobody can really predict a zoonotic crossover event, but they were literally experimenting with highly infectious coronaviruses in Wuhan at the time of the initial outbreak.

Conspiracy theorists have still been spreading the lab leak theory without proof for awhile now because China is the current scary boogeyman. I get that there was lab there studying these diseases, but guessing isn't how science works, and the wet markets have been known to be a possible source of diseases for a long time now by scientists. I remember warnings about this scenario coming up awhile ago.

Lot of diseases come from China probably for similar reasons: it's crowded and close contacts with lots of animals. No one thought the 1956 flu could be a lab leak, or SARS, or H7N9, etc. People just have conspiracy theories about this one because it turned into the biggest pandemic of them all, which is just the roll of the dice of all the diseases coming out of there.

There's a bunch of indications / conspiracy theories that it might have been a lab leak. Basically there's not really a way to know unless the Chinese government starts being more forthcoming with information.

The main reason the conspiracy theory started is because the city where it started had a world renowned virus research facility in it.

Of course, the reason the facility is there in the first place is because Wuhan province is a place where a lot of viruses originate naturally (in bat colonies), so it makes sense you research the viruses close to their natural reservoir.

Look up some of the Japanese lore about Tanuki (the Japanese name for the raccoon dog). It involves magic, giant scrotums, and all sorts of delightful stuff.

If you like anime, Studio Ghibli (famous for a lot of classics including Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and others) did a movie called Pom Poko, which is about tanuki. If you don't care for subtitles, the English dub is pretty good, and the voice cast stars a lot of well known (for the time) American actors.

You might know of the tanuki, which is specifically the Japanese raccoon dog.

I think they determined that the virus that spread to humans was bats that transferred to something in the market (aka intermediate hosts). That virus would have spread there, while technically the bats could have infected humans.