Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 Book Review by Matt Ridley and Alina Chan

The problem is, for someone who knows evolution, 96 percent of the same is not very closely related. In fact, it is really very different. This means that the genomes are different in over 1,000 places, whereas if these other viruses were really closely related to SARS-CoV-2, we would expect a handful. For comparison, they’re about as closely related as you are to a chimpanzee. Viruses accumulate changes faster than we do, but even so, the pandemic and this epidemic are clearly separated by years or decades of independent evolution outside of a laboratory. The book does not mention this annoying fact, among many others.