One of the myths about the virus behind the global pandemic is that it was produced by a scientist and escaped from a lab in Wuhan. This has turned out to be false.
The story question: what if it was created by humans, and did escape from a lab?
There are multiple ways a story with this premise could unfold. The easiest, and most obvious, would be a survival story. Pick a handful of average Joes and Jills, make them fend for themselves, and watch what happens. A good zombie story would be the obvious way to go, but a debilitating respiratory sickness might hit closer to home and sell more copies.
This could also be a 24 style thriller. The main character gets called out of retirement on a farm in the English countryside and has to save his country from the slow spread of the disease. An older guy, one who gets the job done despite stepping on a few toes. The first book in the series could be him saving a person or a few people, the second he saves his country, the third he saves the world from a mutated strain.
The last option for a series wouldn’t focus on the virus escaping from the lab as much as the hospital workers on the ground. A classic medical drama series, where the books deal with waves of the infected. The main character could discover a certain sickness has provided a level of immunity, like cowpox and smallpox. Over the course of the series they have to fight for the treatment to go mainstream, like Erin Brokovich, and the ultimate lesson from the discovery is the power nature has to cure what man has created.
Going back to the news story, there are two forms of evidence pointing to the Coronavirus’s natural development. First, the mutations found in the new virus doesn't bind well to human cells, according to computer simulations. So any scientists designing the new virus wouldn't have used this structure.
The second evidence comes from the similarity of the current outbreak virus with known viruses that affect pangolins and bats.
Right now, there is the possibility that the virus came from animals with its current ability to spread quickly among humans. If so the virus would exist in the animal population in its current form and could cause future hotspots of outbreaks.
BUT, if the virus developed its ability to spread between humans after infecting the first human, the form in the animals would be separate from the one inside humans. There would be less risk of another spontaneous outbreak but the ability to transfer between humans would be more effective.
