US State Department investigators believe the Covid pandemic started as a result of a lab leak from work being done with the Chinese military at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the Sunday Times reports. Health warning: this debate is still being conducted mainly in speculative mode. The essential ingredient – concrete, testable Chinese information – is still missing. But the ST’s Insight team’s sources say military involvement is the reason for that secrecy and that they are “rock solid” that WIV researchers were being treated for Covid in November 2019, before the virus took hold in the city’s civilian population. That would help explain a heat map the paper published of early Covid hotspots closer to the lab than the wet market initially identified as the source of the pandemic. It would also help account for the fact that the first known civilian Covid patient never went to the market.