evidence: The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, has emerged as the most likely source of the COVID-19 outbreak, making a possible alternative explanation that the virus leaked from a research lab increasingly unlikely, according to a paper published in the journal Science by Michael Worobey, a virus evolution expert at the University of Arizona. [...] "The Dec. 8 case has been used by lab leak proponents to argue that the virus could not have emerged at the market since the earliest case had no exposure there," Worobey said. "Moreover, it has led them to claim that the pandemic started at the BSL4 facility of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, since that facility is near where this person lived and shopped. But it is clear that this patient got sick after the first cases had been reported from Huanan, so clearly the virus was circulating in the community at that point." [...] Worobey likened the combined evidence to a "flashing red arrow pointing to the Huanan market as by far the most likely site of origin, with a failure to put a stop to sales of illegal wildlife in markets like Huanan as the reason."