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In favour of it being artificial, the success of it is unprecedented.
It's been given the absolute worst conditions for spreading that any disease has ever been given:
>due to being very modern, sanitation is excellent and thanks to heavy reliance on the internet people can socialise, shop, and often even work with zero risk
>people took it seriously even before a significant number of people died, doing a lot to slow down spread both within and between countries even at a huge economic cost
And despite this, it has become one of the deadliest diseases in history, only being beaten in death toll by HIV (which has decades worth of deaths), diseases from before germ theory was accepted, and Spanish Flu.
Spanish Flu is the only comparable disease, being highly successful despite a proper understanding of disease. It still had significantly better conditions for spreading and killing than COVID-19, but was much more successful.
In favour of it being natural:
>viruses that start pandemics are rare, there can be decades between major killers and the nature of those diseases will vary a lot. So of course whenever a seriously dangerous disease appears it likely would have been over a century since the last time a similar disease appeared, meaning it'll probably seem unprecedented; so this undermines the value of "unprecedented" as an argument for it being artificial.
>it's not a totally alien disease, similar viruses exist
