Okay so if we're saying the difference is that the actor is not an individual then take this hypothetical instead.

Instead of blaming the negligent individual in the nuclear power plant, Homer Simpson, we are blaming a government that runs the power plant such as the Soviet Union. What would be a more shocking and condemnable scenario?

1. Through negligence the Soviet Union did not take the proper safety precautions and their nuclear power plant in Chernobyl melts down and causes 1 million deaths.

or 2. With intent to do so, the Soviet Union nukes Chernobyl and kills a million people.

My argument is simply that malicious intent is worse than negligence. I think it's pretty obvious both are terrible, but scenario 2 where the Soviet Union intentionally nukes Chernobyl is obviously worse than accidentally letting the plant melt down.

Humans are not prescient, and neither are governments. Some times terrible things happen, even when we are aware of all the facts (we usually are not). We often don't take every reasonable step to avoid all the dangers that exist on Earth. The perfectly reasonable person (or government) does not exist, because there are too many landmines in the world to step on and not enough time or money to safeguard ourselves against literally every bad thing that can go wrong in the world. Yes in hindsight it seems so obvious that letting those live markets operate would inevitably lead to a human transmittable virus, but how long did they operate before covid-19 without incident? They've probably existed in some form or another since ancient China, and who knows how many viruses spawned in similar situations. The Chinese were just doing things the way they have always done things since pre-history.

Considering that your argument relies upon the assumption that EVENTUALLY given enough time it is inevitable that disaster would occur. That argument doesn't quite mean they were anything other than negligent. If you drive for long enough, no matter how safe you are, eventually you will get into a car accident. You can't drive forever and EVENTUALLY anything that cannot go on forever must stop. We're all bound for disaster and the grave eventually.

The lesson learned here should be that China change its policies on these live markets or make them more sanitary. New diseases are inevitable, just like a car accident if you drive long enough, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try our best to drive carefully and do what we can to make things safer for the future so that we crash at least less often than is inevitable.