I suspect it was man made. And the stories that say with certainty “it was not made in a lab” are lies because you cannot prove a negative hypothesis. We don’t know for sure and anyone who says it wasn’t from a lab is a moron or a propagandist.
But I don’t think this story rings true. If you want to make your citizens infertile you do it to women not to men. Fatherhood is a legal fiction, as James Joyce said. :-)
Can’t rule anything out. If it was some kind of biowarfare, figure, the Chinese know you lose people in war and they can take the losses. If it was population control, they just needed to reduce their unproductive population. And the logic there is that it was unleashed just before the Lunar New Year, when people who migrated for work leave industrial cities such as Wuhan and go back to their families in the rural parts of the country. In other words, it might be killing Chinese people outside of the cities where there is no media and little state authority to see it, report on it, or check up on the Chinese figures.
I don’t want to believe it was intentionally unleashed on the world. I suspect it just left the laboratory through greed or incompetence/sloppy handling. E.g. someone who worked in the lab got the virus on their shirt, went to the wet market, infected dozens of people, nobody knew they were infected for weeks while they went around infecting tens of thousands more and so on... Or, someone took some test animals out of the lab and sold them for food.
(actually, Joyce said “paternity is a legal fiction” but same difference, only his sounds better).
>> I don’t want to believe it was intentionally unleashed on the world.
W-H-O B-E-N-E-F-I-T-S ?
It can come from the lab and also not be man-made. They had bats there because they are natural hosts to the coronaviruses they were studying.
Coronaviruses have jumped to humans before, so it’s not impossible for it to happen again when the bats were regularly handled by careless or lazy lab techs while feeding or cleaning cages.
SARS1 and MERS are more deadly, but less infectious, but the Chinese didn’t know that yet, just that the new bug on the block was more infectious.