Did the COVID-19 originate in Wuhan?

According to American health experts, the novel coronavirus did not originate from a seafood market in central China's Wuhan City as popularly believed. Since the outbreak of the epidemic, the origin of the novel coronavirus has been widely discussed online, and conspiracy theories around it have also emerged endlessly. Previous scientific studies have already suggested that virus which causes COVID-19 originated through natural processes. In a recent interview with ABC News, Dr Robert Garry, a professor at the Tulane University School of Medicine, once again pointed out that it's a misconception to believe the virus originated at a seafood market in Wuhan, China. According to Garry, the pandemic may be triggered by the mutation in surface proteins of the virus. But it's also possible that a less severe version of the illness was circulating through the population for years, perhaps even decades, before escalating to this point. According to Dr Francis Collins, the director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, in the first scenario, as the new coronavirus evolved in its natural hosts, possibly bats or pangolins, its spike proteins mutated to bind to molecules similar in structure to the human protein, thereby enabling it to infect human cells. Both the SARS and MERS outbreak followed this way. The second scenario is that the novel coronavirus crossed from animals into humans before it became capable of causing human disease. Then, as a result of natural evolution, the virus eventually gained the ability to spread human-to-human and cause diseases.