Have you ever built a sandcastle near the ocean? As the tide begins to come in you can try to repair the sections of the wall that begin to crumble with new sand; yet the water keeps coming in and finds a new section to collapse. Eventually the wall gives way no matter what you do and the castle falls.
I have had several conversations recently about the origin of the COVID-19 virus. This issue has been discussed since the beginning of the pandemic, but I think we all would agree that there seems to have been political motives behind this discussion on both sides. It seems that a fraction of the population would PREFER that the infection originated in the Wuhan laboratory and then escaped, and there is another fraction that would PREFER that the infection arose naturally in the wet markets.
I have no “preference”, but I do believe that some discussion about the underlying issues would be productive.
In 1965 researchers identified a new virus that was the cause of some of the common colds. They named this virus a coronavirus and within the next few years they had identified an additional number of viruses in the same family in both humans and animals.
In 2003 a variant of this virus emerged in Hong Kong and was named SARS (now referred to as SARS-1). This variant was extremely more deadly.
In 2012 a different variant of this virus emerged in Saudi Arabia. This virus, named MERS was also quite deadly.
Fortunately, both of these dangerous viruses exhibited a low transmissibility, so the early identification of them allowed for the geographic isolation of the infection and the ability to suppress and eventually eliminate the viral infections.