Originally Posted by
etudiant
After the SARS experience, China along with every major country has had corona viruses in their bio labs for study, so an escape from sloppy handling in their Wuhan lab is not implausible.
Actually, that's very unlikely. Remember that the virus in the outbreak was unidentified until researchers sequenced the genome for the first time. Unless you believe that Chinese researchers had been working with what came to be called 2019-nCoV but not sharing with fellow researchers around the world with whom they are in regular and routine contact, there's no reason to think it has been seen before this outbreak. That sort of secrecy is pretty much limited to biowarfare research and, as you point out, this coronavirus, or any of its known relatives, would make a really poor weapon.
Of course, the virus is now being grown in cell cultures in any number of labs, so escape is definitely possible. But the people who do this work are skilled and careful.
The inept response of the political leaders in the affected area allowed the virus to spread.
Government response certainly didn't help, but the combination of transmissibility and latency period probably means that the outbreak was unstoppable by the time anyone really understood what was happening.