Since COVID-19 first took off, political leaders, infectious disease specialists, and the lay public have debated its origins. Eventually, two hypotheses emerged: Either the virus crossed over from animals to humans in a wet market in Wuhan—the city in which the disease first appeared—or it leaked from a Chinese lab,

Foreign ministry spokesman Mao Ning said the laboratory leak conclusion being extremely unlikely was reached by the China-WHO joint expert team based on field visits to relevant Wuhan laboratories.