I don't think it escaped the lab.
I think it was seeded into the population, with a pre-prepped propaganda blitz about an epidemic, to cover for the execution, and cremation, of thousands of Hong Kong protesters.
And American media ate it up, and prompted the politicians to act, or else.
It kills the heck out of people who are terminally ill with "co-morbidities."
It empties hospices and skilled-nursing-facilities whose patients have to be turned to keep them from developing pressure ulcers.
Most other folks get the snifflies. Or, if their doctor panics, and decides that they need to be on a ventilator, because they've heard so much about how that is the treatment (it isn't...), and get their lungs shredded like tissue paper by increasingly high pressures, then they show the "lasting damage" that they crowed about.
Yeah, it whups your ass. Past few Santa seasons, I pretty much needed a month vacation time to get over all the crud that I'd catch from the kids during the last week. Whiskey and movies...
I suspect that geriatric morbidity numbers will hit a trough for the next year. They already got the easy ones...
I do think it was cooked up - likely as a bioweapon to be largely non-fatal to a population, to soften resistance.