evidence: Now he’s published a new study in Science that suggests that the earliest diagnosed covid case was incorrectly understood—and that Wuhan’s Huanan wet market was almost certainly the site of a spillover of the SARS-CoV-2 virus from animals to humans, rather than a lab leak. His intervention, and growing confidence in the natural spillover idea, is likely to re-ignite the debate around the hunt for the origins of covid. [...] Nevertheless, many scientists still lean heavily toward the theory that wet markets played a critical role in triggering covid-19. Even though all eyes are on Yunnan and other parts of Southeast Asia as the most likely places of the pandemic’s origins, Hanage says "it’s not batshit crazy" to suggest that Wuhan’s Hubei province could have been where SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally. Indeed, scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have found SARS-like coronaviruses in bats in Hubei. Even though they haven’t systematically tested farmed animals for coronavirus infection across the province, in a little-known study conducted in the aftermath of SARS, they found that the seven civets they tested in a farm in the province in 2004 all were infected with relatives of SARS-CoV-1. Several research teams in China and in the US are trying to figure out where the animals got the virus, whether coronavirus infection among civets is more common than previously thought, and what impact that might have on our understanding of the origins of covid-19.