Whaaaaaaaaat, wild speculation on the internet?
People see something, they discuss it and speculate. And most of the speculation is from articles, social media, and unverifiable information. Unless you're President Pooh Bear in China, you have very little idea what the details of the situation actually are.
Virologists have weighed in on it with some fairly decent educated guesses on it - and given the consensus the origin of the virus is within a reasonable range of "certain enough". I think what a lot of people are making a leap to is in relation to
how the virus got off the (probable) bat and into the human pool. There are millions of bats with many viruses that wouldn't and won't do much to anyone. Somehow ONE BAT out of MILLIONS - a single bat - hit the virus jackpot with a single virus with a single mutation. It happens all the time, but this time the virus survived and the numbers grew in this one bat (sometimes the genetic mutation doesn't favor survival and the virus is unsuccessful at "reproduction".)
How that virus then entered the human chain is what is unknown and may never be known. Bat Soup, bat fries and bat tacos are not a likely vector. After all, we use Bat guano as a soil additive here and elsewhere. Billions of bats have been eaten in the last 50 years and no 2019-nCoV.
A more probable vector is that a bat was flying around, minding its own business and did a shit. It probably landed on some harmless food like a steak, fish or other meat for sale and was taken home by someone. They took the meat, washed it, cooked it and it was harmless. It might have even been a bat - but the viruses within were killed when it was cooked...what got them is the following...
But their hands that touched the unseen bat poop on the flesh of the meat was their undoing. How many of us at home prepare food and we know with certainty "its OK to grab that knife, I'll throw it is the dishwasher later" after touching some uncooked meat? You're already done, the virus has already gotten on to your body. If you've got a cut, bingo, if you brush the hair away from your eye, there it is. Its got a home.
I guess what I am saying is that Bat Soup has been eaten billions of times. We can look for more reasonable explanations - as is usually the case with a virus.
But regardless, know with certainty that at the time I write this, dozens of bats in China at this exact moment have a mutated virus on them as deadly as 2019-nCoV or far worse, but their mutated viruses will never enter the human population and go extinct, while some just might. The same goes for birds. Right now there is a mutated bird flu virus that can devastate the Earths population on one of the billions of birds, but it likely will never be given the
vector to jump to us. Then again it just might today fly over your kids football field and do a shit, and as your kids play, they pick it up off the ground before the UV light kills the virus.
Even with no bats being eaten in china, it will not stop the virus. In Australia bats are everywhere, and if they one day started producing viruses with lethal combinations, Sydney in Australia would be a ghost town in a week. a virus always needs to get lucky. And congrats to them, they sometimes do.
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