> Except substitute “down the street” with “30 km away on the other side of a river”, and notice that everybody who got sick initially was next to the market, none of them anywhere near the lab. > So the lab-leak hypothesis is: this virus created at the lab accidentally escaped to someone who subsequently only infected people on the other side of town.

But this isn't necessarily how it works, at all.

The Wuhan market is one of Wuhan's most population-dense areas, in close proximity to three hospitals where the first cases were identified, and was therefore the concentration for infection-tracing.

In other words, the dataset for early cases was based on a belief that the market was where the infection was spreading, rather than the location of a spreading event that came from elsewhere in the city. Even pneumonia cases that were reported were only post-hoc assigned as probably covid if they were in close proximity to the market.