So, what are you saying, we shouldn’t be concerned? At all? I’m not saying panic, just saying it might be man-made. This virus has mutated in a very deadly way at least twice before, 1918 and 1976.
Of course we should be concerned. I was merely pointing out that a random mutation does not have a 50% chance of making the disease more deadly to humans. I don’t know what the numbers are, but the chance is a great deal lower than that. The reason pandemics are rare is that only an occasional mutation is able to easily infect people.
Flu is a poor choice for a bio-weapon, since it mutates so readily. You could come up with a highly efficient killer and it promptly mutates to relative harmlessness when released.
An efficient bio-weapon would lock in the deadly characteristics. There are a great many other organisms that are more likely as a basis for such a weapon.
FYI, I have a friend who has a doctorate in biochemistry. She was fairly high up in the team that sequenced the human genome.
She says that bioweapons are several orders of magnitude lower than nukes in the resources required to develop them, both as far as physical plant and finances. The primary resource is intellectual, not physical.
Give her $10M, 10000 SF of working space, a few competent assistants and she could develop an efficient bio-weapon in a few months. The scary part is that the “cost of entry” is going down all the time.