I understand your reasoning here, I agree without spending an inordinate amount of time doing first person research on every topic we all basically have to fall back to listening to other people's reasoning on a subject and then decide, but I'm curious, has discussing this and reading the article (and probably some of the other information around) caused you to rethink COVID origin possibilities or at least do some more reading about it?
You're asking in the context of me personally, rather than in the context of the topic.
That answer is "no". The importance I give to a topic is mostly based on what is actionable, which for this topic would seem to be limited to posting my resulting opinion on social media.
Just like I never bought into the "China virus" narrative, I also never bought into the "no, it's definitely not from a lab" narrative. I am comfortable with leaving a topic undecided in my mind.
Contrast with say masking, where I looked at the details and decided to start wearing a P100 respirator in public in February. That was something I could do, where the downside was really small (oh weird looks in a store, boo hoo), and the possible upside was much larger.
In the context of the topic, I didn't find my skim of this article particularly compelling. No smoking guns stuck out at me, and it would seem that other ways of the main claim happening aren't as uncorrelated as one would think at first brush (eg virus circulating publicly in Wuhan, these researchers get it, which is then noticed and recorded because they care about such things for lab workers). But in line with what I said above, that isn't a rejection of the article and "no that definitely didn't happen!", rather it just didn't move my needle much, and I am comfortable with it remaining ambiguously unknown.
The main claim of the article is the bat coronavirus researchers at WIV were hospitalized with Covid symptoms in November. The wet market outbreak was in December into January.
