> SARS-COV-2 has never been detected in any Chinese land animals associated with the market.
They acted very quickly to sterilize the market which eliminated the evidence.
In SARS-1 the market associated with that was allowed to operate until investigators were able to take samples from the animals there and find the related virus.
As a containment measure this was probably the right reflex to have, as an investigative measure this was highly counterproductive. If, however, you are one of the people who blame China for not acting fast enough to contain the spread then you can't criticize them for this.
> There's no reservoir of the stuff found in the wild...unlike viruses like Ebola, Marburg, MERS, etc.
MERS just happened to be very easy since we sampled the camels and they were positive and sitting right there with lots of human contact. In the case of SARS-1 the actual progenitor virus was only found 10 years later in bats in Yunnan. With Ebola the species that harbors the virus has actually yet to be determined, decades later. Marburg was first discovered in 1967 and was only isolated from Egyptian fruit bats in 2009, 42 years later.
I think you're vastly underestimating how hard it is to track down animal reservoirs, and with the reservoir of Ebola still being unknown 46 years after it was discovered kind of undermines your entire point.
We also now have the BANAL viruses found in bats in Laos which are getting closer and closer to a match to SARS-CoV-2, which is actually good progress after only 2-3 years (it would actually be highly suspicious if someone found the 99% homologous bat progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 after only a few years of looking, that would suggest that China knew where it was all along -- actual science that isn't on the TV or movies is quite difficult and usually a lengthy needle-in-a-haystack process as all of these examples show).