ucodegen — it would have been shockingly easy for (intelligence agency of choice) to transport a virus like COVID-19 undetected, even into somewhere like China. Infect a human or livestock (if the virus is zoonotic) carrier, bring the carrier into China. People and livestock cross borders every day.
The low lethality would be a feature, not a bug, assuming the goal was to shut down economies, not to cause a massive amount of deaths.
It’s also apparently stable in feces, urine, and liquid culture medium for 24 hours at room temperature. Sounds like it could have been brought to China in a Snapple or Gatorade bottle…
Note that I’m NOT saying that COVID-19 is a bioweapon, just that smuggling a low-lethality weaponized virus into China would have been less difficult than you make it seem.