This lab that so happened to study viruses linked to bats has an outbreak start in the same community that the lab is located.

It doesn't take a tinfoil hat to at least extensively investigate the possibility. In fact, except for the the political power of China, we would already have our scientists conducting an extensive independent investigation if it was a small country without nuclear weapons. We wouldn't give them a choice.

...where woo-woo is standard operating procedure.

It is good science to study animal viruses that are known to transmit to humans. In fact, it's normal procedure, given that most flu viruses originate in China from birds and pigs.

Since it is believed that the SARS and MERS viruses originated in bats - a suspect organism in SARS-CoV2 also includes pangolins - a good prepared health team would very naturally be involved in studying these viruses.

At the same time, there's no way to distinguish between sloppy handling of unmodified virus samples in a lab and encountering the virus on the actual animal.

They're blocks away from each other. (Since it's a reciprocal relation, that makes sense, right?)

The lab has reportedly had accusations of sloppy handling and collection procedures.

Not sure it's a big deal, except that if it's a lab it makes the cover-up (slightly) more reasonable.

This of course, is necessary. We are not going to understand this virus and learn how to deal with it unless we have samples of live virus. My understanding is that the Chinese rapidly sequenced the viral RNA because they have very qualified people who know how to do it.

Having worked with dangerous materials myself, I assume that most people respect the materials with which they work for their own protection. At least they will if properly trained.

There are exceptions. For example I once worked in a lab where people were so afraid of radioactive materials that they simply allowed them to accumulate in hoods thus increasing their potential for exposure. I thus had to take responsibility for those materials myself, since I understood what they were and how they should be properly handled. In this American lab, training was poor. (After setting up systems to deal with it, I left the company.)

My overall impression of Chinese science is very positive. Roughly half of what I read in the journals that I regularly scan is written by Chinese scientists. There are linguistic artifacts in some of the writing, but in general, the science is of high quality. It is a mistake to assume that our labs and our scientists are superior, particularly because we increasingly hate science and scientists in this country and the Chinese, um, don't.

What we are seeing is that areas of high population density have the highest risk. It's not an accident that New York - mostly in the metropolitan area, New Jersey and Massachusetts have high rates of infection and death. Thus it's also not surprising that the disease traveled fast in Wuhan.

I am not entirely sure at this point, however that the Chinese government is being up front about the current rate of infection, but I do believe that Chinese scientists are doing an outstanding job in addressing the crisis on their level.

A country ruled by Trump has no right whatsoever to cast aspersions on any other country from a position of superiority. At least Xi is not telling people to drink drink bleach and shoot up Lysol.

things all the time.
After all you never know what new medical breakthroughs might be discovered through such research not to mention potentially detecting a problem virus beforehand.

Lack of evidence is not the same as evidence of the contrary.

If China hadn't been so absurdly secretive I would have been tempted to give them a pass. But Occam's Razor combined with their behavior certainly leads to some doubts.

this is scary as hell. everyday i wake up and feel like I'm living in a horror movie

We're all in this nightmare together. Hopefully we'll come out ok on the other side.