If you look at human history, countries almost never face any sort of consequences for their screw-ups, and the bigger the screw-up the lower the chance of it, especially if we are talking about a big player like China. To me this is the saddest part of this who story, China knows well what needs to be done to prevent these pandemics in the future, and they won't do it, because there's no consequences for causing hundreds of thousands of deaths globally.

Based on the data Forster and his colleagues have collected, the coronavirus outbreak appears to have started between September 13 and December 7.

He said it is possible the outbreak did not originate in Wuhan, as until January 17, almost all the isolates were type B. In Guangdong, a province about 500 miles from Wuhan, seven of the 11 isolates were type A.

In December, the first cluster of cases was traced back to a seafood market in Wuhan, leading some to suggest this is where the virus first emerged. But as we learn more about the virus, this version of events appears less likely. A study published in the Lancet showed some of the first people infected with the virus did not have direct contact with the market.

“It is possible that a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 jumped into humans, acquiring the genomic features described above through adaptation during undetected human-to-human transmission,” they said in the paper.

“Once acquired, these adaptations would enable the pandemic to take off and produce a sufficiently large cluster of cases to trigger the surveillance system that detected it.”

The findings by Western scientists echoed the mainstream opinion among Chinese researchers.

Zhong Nanshan, who advises Beijing on outbreak containment policies, had said on numerous occasions that there was growing scientific evidence to suggest the origin of the virus might not have been in China.

“The occurrence of Covid-19 in Wuhan does not mean it originated in Wuhan,” he said last week.