> Or, in other words, what would we do differently if it were a lab leak?
If the virus is a laboratory construct (e.g., a recombinant of two novel natural viruses with a human-chosen FCS; we can argue about how likely that was, but no genomic evidence can exclude that), then it would near-certainly never have existed without that laboratory manipulation. The pandemic could near-certainly have been permanently avoided simply by not constructing it. This was a matter of controversy long before the pandemic; such work was banned in 2014, but the ban expired in 2017:
https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-lifts-3-year-ban...
If the virus is naturally-evolved but sampled and released accidentally by scientists, then it might otherwise later have been released accidentally by infected non-scientists. It wouldn't have been necessarily though, especially since WIV researchers sampled remote bat caves that no other humans routinely entered. Sampling of sites with significant existing human traffic (farms, markets, tourism sites, etc.) seems like a clear benefit, a negligible increase in the existing risk of natural spillover. Sampling of remote sites without such traffic seems much less clear.
There's something weird about public attitude to biological risks. When the government did a controlled burn in New Mexico that got out of control and destroyed hundreds of houses, everyone involved recognized that they'd screwed up, even though fires also occur naturally, and even though controlled burns are a valuable tool in controlling natural fires. It seems that intuition doesn't hold for lab-origin pandemics. The 1977 flu originated from scientific research (although the exact nature of that research--whether it was a failed vaccine, or a vaccine challenge trial, or an experiment at the bench--is disputed), and it killed about 700k people. No one seems to care, and I don't really understand why.