China has not been forthcoming with information about the spread. They downplayed things up until the new year, then it spread rapidly.
There is evidence that multiple scientists became sick with covid like symptoms. These scientists knew the dangers these viruses presented, so you did not see spread amongst their family or hospital workers.
But there are also other people in the lab who could have been exposed and spreading the virus. There is a lot of info out there about lab leaks. It also takes time for i virus to spread before it is noticed.
It could take 4-6 weeks for a virus to spread before enough cases are noticed. There is a 4-5 day incubation period before symptoms start. If patient zero spread it to 3 people, and those people spread it to 3 more, etc. It could take 15-20 days to spread to 27 people. There is a lot of public health info that can explain this better. This is where the delay from the lab workers getting sick until the wet market outbreak.
I do believe the wet market was a super spreader event. But this type of event only occurs if there were multiple people actively spreading the virus by coughing and touching things. 1 bat locked in a cage likely would not have spread the way we saw. There also would have been a more isolated infectious zone around that bat. the natural origin just doesn't make sense with what was found in the wet market.
As far as the virus itself. The lab was using mice with humanized lung tissue for their experiments. so the scientists did not know exactly how the viruses would respond in the human body. it is possible that the virus mutated enough once in a human host that it was able to spread. there are other possibilities as well.
