Discussions

Interesting Q. Be nice to know.  
Remember the media speculating from the bats, then suspicion it came from the snake, then guessing it came from the pangolin, then back to the bat.  
Hopefully someone will know and correct me.

It's possible we'll never know, but pangolins seem to have been involved somewhere along the way, although it might not have been the only host. Humanity has a long relationship with coronaviruses, and they're often zoonotic This is hardly the first time such a devestating jump from animals to humans have occurred.  
 
"The portion of the virus that binds to ACE2 is identical to one found in a known pangolin coronavirus."  
 
from https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/health/covid-science-express-vanished-sense-smell-viral-origins-and-vaccines under the section "The virus was not made or purposefully modified in a laboratory".

The conspiracy theorist in me says this was man made.  
 
The naturalist in me says it is a host trying to lessen or eliminate a parasite.  
 
The realist in me says it is a random occurrence that we will never truly know the cause of.  
 
The cynic in me says not to believe what we are ultimately told about how it started.

I love this post. It is about as close to the truth as we will likely ever get.

And just to nip the conspiracy theories in the bud, here's a further bit from the article I linked to above (because it is a rather dense read):  
 
"[T]here are too many pieces of evidence against the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a laboratory or that it was being cultured in cells and escaped confinement to infect humans. [...] [A} lab origin for SARS-CoV-2 would almost certainly contain the coronavirus backbone that is typically used for lab experiments, but this backbone is simply absent from SARS-CoV-2. [...] [Furthermore] the presence of sugars bound to very specific bits of the proteins coded by the virus suggest the involvement of an immune system, meaning that this happened in a living organism and not in Petri dishes."