The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf]

We've had plenty of people hospitalized who were not so sick and elderly that they depended on modern medicine to stay alive. Without modern hospital care, more of them would die.

A "background check" does not change this fact, nor does your point actually negate the comment you are responding too. No one here is arguing that you must listen and believe everything that someone has written in a paper, but things must be proven and disproven.

"Background checking" in any form is not science. It might help you make a decision. But that does not make the decision a scientific one even if you consider it "an informed" decision.

To be completely honest, it has become silly that things like this need to be said and reirerated so often on HN.

As to the laboratory being close: it wasn't accidentally located in Wuhan. The city is the regional centre for a region that only recently expanded into somewhat pristine nature. With ongoing and constant encroachment of natural habitats, there is far more contact between wild species and humans than there is in Europe/North America, or even other Chinese regions.

1. SARS-CoV-2 has a number of unique and unusual genetic features, when compared to close relatives, many of which explain its high virulence and infectivity among humans.

2. A series of research papers published by a group of virologists, dating back a little over a decade, demonstrate (1) a progressively increasing understanding of viral features which make coronaviruses more infectious and virulent in humans, and (2) laboratory capabilities for successfully creating chimeric viruses (e.g. moving one specific protein sequence from a bat SARS-like virus to human SARS virus) to test their hypotheses.

3. Each of the unique and unusual features of SARS-CoV-2 appears somewhere in this line of research.

4. Researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in the city where the outbreak began, were intimately involved this line of research.

Taken together, the publicly-available evidence indicates that a select group of virologists had the domain knowledge and laboratory capabilities to create chimeric viruses which possess each of the unusual features of SARS-CoV-2, and that select group of virologists was concentrated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology located at ground zero for the pandemic.

The authors feel that, in light of this preponderance of circumstantial evidence, the hypothesis that the biogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 involved human intervention should be seen as the leading (i.e. most likely) explanation.

They do not make any statement about how the virus first infected a live human and spread into a pandemic, but conditioned on their biogenesis hypothesis being true, one would then assume an accidental lab release from WIV as the most likely explanation.

This will be misinterpreted by everyone who doesn't understand the Bayes rule (which is 99.999% of the population). What she's saying is just a fancy version of "this is the kind of a virus that would likely cause a pandemic", nothing more.