God had nothing to do with a designer virus. They have been living with these bats for thousands of years. We are seeing new viral strains every couple years now. Why ? What changed with the bats ?
I’m of the mind that it doesn’t really matter where it came from anymore.
Nothing changed with the bats. Antibodies to bat coronavirus were found in humans in villages near the bats’ caves years before COVID-19 showed up. (IIRC, there was a link on FR to this a couple weeks ago.) In the same study the researchers found 500(!) different coronaviruses in the bats, and thought they had only scratched the surface.(!!)
What changed is, primarily, travel and the transportation system in China. Compare maps of the road and rail system in China 30 or 40 years ago, vs. today. The transformation is nothing short of astounding.
Plus, the bulk of the population was lifted out of abject poverty, so they have some money to travel - mostly by rail or bus. And, do they ever. I saw an estimate of 15 BILLION person-trips (intercity, national, international, etc.) expected for the 2020 CNY, before all this (virus) hit and the lockdowns were imposed. From some personal connections / knowledge, I don’t doubt that figure at all.
In the past, if a virus made the jump, most likely it never made it out of whichever village or region near the cave was afflicted. That’s not to say there were no epidemics - there have been great epidemics during cold spells in China’s history, and probably many lesser ones lost in that long history. But the ones we do know of were, as you imply, less frequent. (Side note: COVID-19 would likely have not even been noticed in China before, oh, I don’t know. Maybe 1900? People, especially elders, got sick and died routinely from all sorts of causes of pneumonia. Some years more than others. Only particularly nasty epidemics with high fatality rates would even get recorded, I suspect.)
Now, you have all this unprecedented travel, which includes, by the way, substantial tourist traffic to the caves. (Some of the caves are dang impressive - I’d go see ‘em too, if they were within a day’s drive from me.) However, Chinese culinary, hygiene, and animal processing and slaughter habits have not caught up to the new realities...
Seems to me part of the bat, or pangolin, or whatever, corona virus RNA(?) sequence was intentionally spliced into a human corona virus during research. It has nothing to do with natural mutation. I’m sure there are legitimate reasons for doing this, but no matter: it slips out of the lab somehow.
But that’s probably something which can’t be claimed definitively, so the scientists trying to figure out what happened hedge their disclosures - they don’t want to implicate any particular research team with something they’re not sure of, they just say “it happened through mutation”.
On the menu? Started as a fad, but created a demand? Bushmeat.