Photo Credit: European Virus Archive
In principle, when a new virus appears in humans that has a genomic similarity to a virus existing in non-laboratory animals, it is plausible to assume that it originated from those animals. This absolutely applies to coronaviruses, and it is for this reason that SARS-CoV-2 was widely postulated to have emerged that way as well.
All that needs to be done to confirm such a hypothesis is to locate the concrete mechanism and conditions that enabled the emergence of the human virus. This kind of a priori approach inevitably endows the natural contagion theory with supremacy over any alternative unnatural contagion concept.