Covid-19 has evolved from SARS and first appeared in Wuhan, China at the end of 2019.
The first human victims of the new virus had visited an animal/food market and speculation was that the virus came from there.
The virus was quickly isolated, analysed and the RNA sequence was put online, available for download, for anybody interested.
In February, I downloaded the virus sequence and compared it to the (also downloaded) SARS sequence. I was just curious to see if they were related and if the sequence was manipulated.
I found that the sequences were indeed very similar and no large manual insertations/deletions had been done.
You can find the research in detail here.
Problem is that there is another way of creating a virus: by “manipulated” natural selection:
If you grow a virus population in a lab and select the desired individuals and then continue breeding with them, you can also manipulate the sequence.
This is very difficult to prove or disprove…