Hello Umanwizard, I'll try to make that less ambiguous. What I mean is, over the last century it has become common to believe that we are taming pathogens - smallpox, polio, maybe malaria next, diseases that have been with us for a very long time. As our technology enables this, I fear another trend pushes us in the opposite direction, that as we encroach further and further into fuller exploitation of remaining wilderness we are encountering novel potential pathogens at a greater rate, and our highly connected single global population means that transmission happens very quickly. So my question doesn't concern the lethality of Covid, rather that is is novel and has spread globally quickly - whether this might be an early data point in a future data set, that will indicate we are now be generating new novel pandemics at a greater rate. If that is the case, that will be a more difficult problem to solve than the problem of lax lab safety.

There are interesting points in this thread, about how well we would respond to confirmation that the pandemic was triggered by a lab leak, so I'm not saying that there would be a good outcome from knowing it was a lab leak, rather that even if we never know the truth, it would probably be a better thing for the future of our civilisation it was a lab leak, rather than the first significant event in accelerating sequence of naturally generated pandemics. These are not the only two options of course, but that was the ambiguously stated meaning of my comments

cheers

monk