Did God create the coronavirus?

The simple answer is YES. In Christianity, God is the author of life. God creates everything that has life. We need to also remember that coronavirus is just another virus. We might as well ask why God created the 1918 Spanish flu virus which also killed millions, or why God created the 14th century Bubonic plague bacteria which killed 30-60 percent of the European population!

At the same time, God also allows the virus life to be studied scientifically. This is due to a very important feature of God's creation: its orderliness and its openness for empirical investigation, which we shouldn't take for granted. In other words, it's stable enough (unlike quantum particles) and visible enough to be observed (unlike a ghost). Without this feature, science cannot operate. So God allows science, and we should be thankful to God that this enables us to have advances in microbiology, medicine, supercomputing (for DNA sequencing), refrigeration (for the vaccine), transportation, scientific institutions (CDC, labs, pharma companies), established sharing of information via journals and Internet, etc. which allow us in the 21st century to minimize casualties compared to previous pandemics.

The hard question is: why God allows those pandemics to happen? This question is made even harder to answer because Christianity holds that:

• God is omniscient, which includes even knowledge of the future (if you're not an Open Theist), so God should anticipate how this little being could wreak havoc.
• God is good, so creates the perennial question on why a good God would allow suffering on such a wide scale to happen.

Several clues for the answer can be found in the following established Christian teachings:

• Death and disease are evil, a fact of the fallen human nature (after the Fall of Adam) as well as fallen nature in general, groaning to be made anew (Rom 8:19-23).
• God, by undergoing incarnation in Jesus, can sympathize with a human person's weaknesses and suffering
• God, by virtue of being outside time and space, can be present in every moment of our lives, so we are never alone (see my other answer for in depth explanation)
• Suffering and death don't diminish our capacity to be saved, sanctified, and unified with God. In fact, it can help us, if we see those from proper perspective.
• Life on earth, which is a shadow of what is to come, is not the ultimate reality, not the place where we can expect ultimate happiness. Death or disability by Covid is not the end.
• What God wants from us most of all is that the strong should not oppress the weak (this is part of his notion of justice), which implies that we should not turn a blind eye to our suffering neighbor (cf. the good Samaritan).
• God is love and God expects human societies to be Christianized, in the sense that each society should embodies the divine love by each member participating in God's love through grace and THEN by sharing this love to others.

Based on the above, we can then hazard some guesses:

1. God is using Covid to re-kindle love among people of the Earth, to remind us that at the core we are united in ONE human nature, despite of our nationalities, ethnicities, religions, languages, races, and sex. Everyone is susceptible to Covid infection, everyone knows someone who suffers / dies because of Covid, everyone has the opportunity to love.
2. God wants to remind us that despite our technological advances we can never be God and should never try be God, and thus we should not repeat the mistake that Adam made in the garden of Eden, or at the Tower of Babel. We should be concerned that in the past 100 years there are many philosophical and scientific positions that negate God's rightful & exclusive privilege in setting the moral standard as well as to relate to us as Creator. Thus, the past 100 years have witnessed yet another (and more serious!) rebellion of people against God:
   • The culture of death in which moral crimes such as abortion and euthanasia are viewed as individual rights.
   • "Make your own ethics" (moral relativity) promoted by philosophers such as Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus.
   • Scientific materialism that asserts how every part of human nature is simply a function of the brain's neurochemistry and neural network, expressed in the belief of Cryonics .
   • Denigrating the image of God in us by saying that someday in a singularity emergent consciousness in Artificial Intelligence will render human nature obsolete.
   • Using genomics and IVF to create designer baby which in turn can lead to injustice, such as explored in the movie Gattaca
3. God wants us to use Covid as opportunities for mercy and for the stronger to help the weaker, such as when developed countries which have more resources have opportunities to assist developing countries in obtaining vaccines. Or at a smaller scale, how the younger can help the often forgotten and vulnerable elderly to be protected from Covid. We have seen many first responder heroes as a result.

Further Reading

1. Why is God allowing the coronavirus pandemic? by Stuart Briscoe
2. When Someone Asks Me Why God Allows Covid-19 by Kirk Durston who wrote several journal articles on God and evil