Oof, my bad. Info came from someone I know, evidently I made the mistake of believing them.
Thanks, and thanks for letting me know. I’ll have to let that person know that, as much as I normally take their word on stuff because they have a lot of common sense and keep up on reputable news sources, this particular “fact” was a blatant lie and whatever news source they got it from needs to be vetted more thoroughly.
That is still a possibility but given the conditions of some of the illegal wet markets in China, it is significantly more likely to have stemmed from one of those. I was reading the book Spillover, which was written before COVID, and they went to some wet markets around where SARS originated and while there were more regulations around wet markets, they were largely ignored. The author basically concluded that it was still a ripe environment for another SARS outbreak.