It's interesting looking at the timeline before Western media picked it up -- in the very early stages, chatter online referencing a leak, (or there was something released deliberately) seemed to be fear of it being a SARS 'biological weapon'. there was overlap with the newly emerging health crisis and the Hong Kong protests, which seems to have fueled that speculation. A good analysis of that time period was done by the Atlantic Council [0]
I have also been archiving different web findings pertaining to all forms of 'leak' speculation in the form of a timeline [1]
[0] https://atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Weapo...