I haven't made a snapshot post of my model in a while. There's two causes (1) I'm exceptionally busy with my real life (2) it's essentially the same as the last time I posted: slow slope downward on infections/day. Transmission rate at 0.09. IFR at 0.65%.
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Instead I'll opine on the melange of popular topics:
Origin - The virus seemingly to went from a horseshoe bat to either a pangolin (chinese armadillo) or some kind of snake then to humans.
Live market: This hypothesis is very much plausable. This certain snake and bat are uncommon but actual foods and the pangolins are sold because the scales have medicinal value.
Natural contact: No idea. Someone needs to get a bat, pangolin, and snake expert into a room to figure out if and how much these specific species may or may not interact in nature. Bats tend to cover large distances and are immune to the natural boundries that inhibit those of us walking around.
Lab (accident): I think this is actually equally or more likely a scenario than above. The SARS-COV family of viruses is actually one of the most studied viruses in the world right now and part of that research does create new strains. Many of these varieties are accessible down to even the graduate/doctoral level even if the access is controlled and monitored. I'm not sure exactly what the safety and security protocols are in China, but they in the past at least did not meet the US standard. The two biggest labs heading up this type of research are in Wuhan and somewhere in the US that I can't remember (California?). There's no record of a similar strain in online databases before 2020 (besides the bat one itself), but China gonna China.
Lab (purposeful): I don't think there's much evidence to support this. Much of the evidence used against it, I don't find compelling either. I've seen two "studies" telling us what a bioweapon would look like and how this doesn't look like one. Ironically, the studies had differing criteria for what a bioweapon should look like to begin with. At best they were telling us how much better their bioweapon would be. They are also assuming that someone had infinite resources before releasing this and didn't get grab whatever they could get their hands on. It would be expected to quickly mutate into something else after the inital release anyway. I'm not a big fan of this hypothesis, but it's also not patently false. I will say that there would be no better cover than to release this in Wuhan, where there are several other origins as distractions.
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What this thing looks like in a month: No one knows, everyone will claim they were right. We are staring into a blackhole just like we were in March.
It's not clear how much reduction was social driven and how much is policy driven. I'm leaning towards social being more important overall, but one also does inform the other. You should be very skeptical of "government does X and we get Y" hindcasting or projection. We are very unlikely to go back to anything close to the inital surge of the virus in any scenario cooked up by governmental leadership.
We should start to see some data following the effects of lifted restrictions as early as next week.