Reading this, which looks like a pretty definitive take on the origins of the pandemic. Important conclusion: most zoonoses of this kind would go extinct of their own accord. science.sciencemag.org/content/early/…
That actually makes a lot of sense if you consider everything we know about the clustered nature of transmission. Like they say, we should do better at detecting zoonoses early on
Nice illustration of how a transmission chain could sputter along a bit before making it big. Note that what this means is that while the pandemic descends from the market in Wuhan, that's not necessarily where the index case occurred 
Indeed, given the epidemiology of the disease, it would be surprising for the very first infection to initiate a superspreading event that was immediately noticed. And then there are the many mild infections that would *not* have attracted attention
I've commented several times that the virus must have come into humans some time before we noticed it, but this is setting out to quantify how long it might have been. Answer - not that long. Mid Oct to mid Nov 2019
That's done with simulations, which also allow estimates of how many people were actually infected before the pandemic was recognized, There is a lot of uncertainty as you can see. And note how in the simulations shown in C how many attempted outbreaks die out of their own accord
But when it comes to simulations, need to think carefully about the assumptions. So now I am going to read it more properly.
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