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Where did it come from? More than three years into the pandemic with untold millions of people dead, that question about the origin of Covid-19 remains widely disputed and fraught, with facts sparkling amid a tangle of analyses and hypotheticals like Christmas lights strung on a dark, thorny tree. One school of thought holds that the virus, known to science as SARS-CoV-2, spread to humans from a nonhuman animal, probably in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, an emporium brimming with fish, meats and wildlife on sale as food in Wuhan, China.\n\nAnother school argues that the virus was laboratory-engineered as a bioweapon to infect humans and cause them harm, and was possibly devised in a \u201cshadow project\u201d sponsored by the People\u2019s Liberation Army of China. A third school, more moderate than the second but also implicating laboratory work, suggests that the virus got into its first human victim by accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research complex on the eastern side of the city, maybe after undergoing well-meaning but reckless genetic manipulation that made it more dangerous to people.\n\nIf you feel confused by these possibilities, undecided, suspicious of overconfident assertions \u2014 or just tired of the whole subject of the pandemic and whatever little bug has caused it \u2014 be assured that you aren\u2019t the only one.